Trans: a reliable broadcast protocol

Abstract

Trans is a novel reliable broadcast protocol for the data-link layer of the ISO protocol hierarchy. The protocol exploits the broadcast nature of the physical communication media typically used in local-area networks. A combination of positive and negative acknowledgment strategies with transitivity of positive acknowledgments provides reliable operation without requiring a separate acknowledgment from every recipient of a message frame. Trans achieves reliable communication despite a noisy communication medium and processor fail-stop, omission and timing faults. Multicast, rather than fully broadcast, communication is readily obtained by operating several subnetworks over the same local-area network or, alternatively, by including a destination address list in the header of each broadcast frame.