Distributed stream stores continued

 A P2P network introduces a network first design where peers are autonomous agents and there is a protocol to enable them to negotiate contracts, transfer data, verify the integrity and availability of remote data and to reward with payments. It provides tools to enable all these interactions. Moreover, it enables the distribution of the storage of a file as shards on this network and these shards can be stored using a distributed hash table. The shards themselves need not be stored in this hash table, rather a distributed network and messaging could facilitate it with location information. Messages are helpful to enforce consistency as nodes come up or go down. For example, a gossip protocol may be used for this purpose and it involves propagating updates via message exchanges. Message exchanges can include state or operation transfers. Both involve the use of vector clocks. In state transfer model, each replica maintains a state version tree which contains all the conflicting updates. When the client sends its vector clock, the replicas will check whether the client state precedes any of its current versions and discard it accordingly. When it receives updates from other replicas via gossip, it will merge the version trees. In operation transfer model, each replica has to first apply all operations corresponding to the cause before those corresponding to the effect. This is necessary to keep the operations in the same sequence on all replicas and is achieved by adding another entry in the vector clock, a V-state, that represents the time of the last updated state. In order that this causal order is maintained, each replica will buffer the update operation until it can be applied to the local state A tuple of two timestamps - one from the client's view and another from the replica's local view is associated with every submitted operation. Since operations are in different stages of processing on different replicas, a replica will not discard the state or operations it has completed until it sees the vector clocks from all others to have preceded it