A TOTAL ORDERING MULTICAST PROTOCOL USING PROPAGATION TREES

The paper discusses a multicast mechanism using propagation trees, It guarantees the total ordering (including causal ordering) of messages in multiple groups, The mechanism introduces a concept of meta-groups (a subset of a multicast group) and organizes meta-groups into propaga tion trees, Compared with the existing propagation tree mechanisms, th is mechanism has the following advantages: 1) Greater parallelism, Mes sages can be sent to destinations by using broadcast networks, 2) Less message cost and less latency time, It takes less network communicati on to multicast a message and less time to have the message delivered to all the destinations, 3) More flexibility to dynamic membership cha nges and higher reliability for message propagation, It does not need to restructure propagation trees when there is a change in membership, and a site failure does not stop the message propagation to its desce ndants in the tree.