A Fault-Tolerant Token-Based Atomic Broadcast Algorithm

Abstract

Many atomic broadcast algorithms have been published in the last 20 years. Token-based algorithms represent a large class of these algorithms. Interestingly, all the token-based atomic broadcast algorithms rely on a group membership service and none of them uses unreliable failure detectors directly. This paper presents the first token-based atomic broadcast algorithm that uses an unreliable failure detector instead of a group membership service. It requires a system size that is quadratic in the number of supported failures. The special case of a single supported failure (f=1) requires n=3 processes. We experimentally evaluate the performance of this algorithm in local and wide area networks, in order to emphasize that atomic broadcast is efficiently implemented by combining a failure detector and a token-based mechanism. The evaluation shows that the new token-based algorithm surpasses the performance of the other algorithms in most small-system settings.