Causally ordering group communication protocol

Abstract

Distributed application systems require group communications among multiple processes. In the group communication, it is important to discuss in what order each process in the group can receive messages. The paper presents a causally ordering group communication (CO) protocol which provides the same causal ordering of messages for all the processes in the group. In the CO protocol, the messages received are causally ordered by using the sequence numbers of the messages. The CO protocol is based on the fully distributed control scheme, i.e. no master controller, and uses high-speed networks where each process may fail to receive messages due to the buffer overrun. Furthermore, the CO protocol provides asynchronous data transmission for multiple processes in the group.