Totally Ordered Multicast in Large-Scale Systems

Luís Rodrigues, Henrique Fonseca and Paulo Veríssimo

Selected sections of this report will be published in the Proceedings of the 16th International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems, Hong Kong, May 1996.

Abstract

Totally ordered multicast protocols have proved to be extremely useful in supporting fault-tolerant distributed applications. This paper compares the performance of the two main classes of protocols providing total order in large-scale systems (token-site and symmetric protocols) and proposes a new dynamic hybrid protocol that, when applied to systems where the topology/traffic patterns are not known a priori, offers a much lower latency than any of the previous classes of protocols in isolation.

Also available extended report (gzip postscript).