DESIGN AND ANALYSIS OF AN EFFICIENT AND RELIABLE ATOMIC MULTICAST PROTOCOL

This paper presents an efficient and novel reliable group multicast pr otocol for asynchronous distributed systems. Based on a logical-clock token ring approach, the protocol guarantees the total ordering and at omicity of multicast messages and is highly efficient. The recovery al gorithms of the protocol can handle communication faults, process cras h failures and network partition. We describe the detailed design, a c orrectness proof and the performance analysis of the protocol. For a g roup of n processes, the protocol requires only up to (n - 1) control messages to reach a consistent view of the group in a fault-free case. The protocol has been implemented on a local area network of workstat ions. The performance of the implementation is also presented. (C) 199 8 Elsevier Science B.V.