I'm designing an hierarchical distributed system (every node has zero or more "master" nodes to which it propagates its current data). The data gets continuously updated and I'd like to guarantee that at least N nodes have almost-current data at any given time. I do not need complete consistency, only eventual consistency (t.i. for any time instant, the current snapshot of data should eventually appear on at least N nodes. It is tricky to define the term "current" here, but still). Nodes may fail and go back up at any moment, and there is no single "central" node.

O overflowers! Point me to some good papers describing replication schemes. I've so far found one: Consistency Management in Optimistic Replication Algorithms