A causal multicast protocol for mobile distributed systems

Causal message ordering in the context of group communication ensures that ail the message receivers observe consistent ordering of events affecting a group as a whole. This paper presents a scalable causal multicast protocol for mobile distributed computing systems. In our protocol, only a Dart of the mobility agents in the system is involved in group computations and the resulting size of control information in messages can be kept small. Our p rotocol can outperform qualitatively the counterparts in terms of communica tion overhead and hand-off complexity An analytical model is also developed to evaluate our proposal. The performance results show that the proposed p rotocol is promising.