AbstractMulticast group communication is needed for fault‐tolerant distributed systems and, in particular, for the new Fault Tolerant CORBA standard, to maintain strong replica consistency. However, different multicast group communication protocols are appropriate for different environments, which makes it difficult to define a single standard multicast protocol. In this paper, we present a multicast group communication engine and bridge for CORBA that allows multiple group communication protocols to be used concurrently. We also present the Fault Tolerant Multicast Protocol, a group communication protocol that allows different fault tolerance systems to interoperate.The group communication engine and bridge places Lamport timestamps on messages, and multicasts messages to groups, using one or more group communication protocols. The group communication protocols reliably deliver the timestamped messages in timestamp order to the group communication engine, which integrates these streams of messages into a single stream for delivery in timestamp order. The Fault Tolerant Multicast Protocol operates over IP Multicast, and consists of the Reliable Multicast Protocol which provides reliable source‐ordered message delivery, the Reliable Ordered Multicast Protocol which provides reliable totally ordered message delivery, and the Host Group Membership Protocol which provides host group membership services. Copyright © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.