xAMp: A Protocol Suite for Group Communication
L. Rodrigues and P. Veríssimo
INESC Technical Report (RT/43-92)
A shorter version of this report was published in the Proceedings of
the 11th Symposium On Reliable Distributed Systems, Oct, 1992 Houston,
Texas.
Abstract
The xAMp is a highly versatile group communications service aimed at
supporting the development of distributed applications, with different
dependability, functionality, and performance requirements. These
range from unreliable and non-ordered to atomic multicast, and are
enhanced by efficient group addressing and management support. The
basic protocols are synchronous, clock-less and designed to be used
over broadcast local-area networks, and portable to a number of them.
The functionality provided yields a reasonably complete solution to
the problem of reliable group communication.
Whilst other protocols exist that offer similar services, we follow a
new engineering approach by deriving all qualities of service from a
single basic procedure. Thus, their implementation shares data
structures, procedures, failure-recovery algorithms and group monitor
services, resulting in an highly integrated package.
Also available as
INESC RT/43-92 (gzip postscript).