An oblivious observed-reset embeddable replicated counter

Abstract

Embedding CRDT counters has shown to be a challenging topic, since their introduction in Riak Maps. The desire for obliviousness, where all information about a counter is fully removed upon key removal, faces problems due to the possibility of concurrency between increments and key removals. Previous state-based proposals exhibit undesirable reset-wins semantics, which lead to losing increments, unsatisfactorily solved through manual generation management in the API. Previous operation-based approaches depend on causal stability, being prone to unbounded counter growth under network partitions. We introduce a novel embeddable operation-based CRDT counter which achieves both desirable observed-reset semantics and obliviousness upon resets. Moreover, it achieves this while merely requiring FIFO delivery, allowing a tradeoff between causal consistency and faster information propagation, being more robust under network partitions.