Non-blocking message total ordering protocol

Abstract

Message total ordering is a critical part in active replication in order to maintain consistency among members in a fault tolerant group. The paper proposes a non-blocking message total ordering protocol (NBTOP) for distributed systems. Non-blocking property refers to that the members in a fault tolerant group keep on running independently without waiting for installing the same group view when a fault tolerant group evolves even when decision messages collide. NBTOP takes advantage of token ring as its logical control way. Members adopt re-requesting mechanism (RR) to obtain their lost decisions. Forward acknowledgement mechanism (FA) is put forth to solve decision collisions. The paper further proves that NBTOP satisfies the properties of total order, agreement, and termination. NBTOP is implemented, and its performance test is done. Comparing with the performance of Totem, the results show that NBTOP has a better total ordering delay. It manifests that non-blocking property helps to improve protocol efficiency.