Treffer: The Intergroup Protocols: Scalable Group Communication For The Internet

Existing reliable totally ordered group communication protocols have been developed for local-area networks and do not, in general, scale well to large numbers of nodes and wide-area networks. The InterGroup suite of protocols is a scalable group communication system that supports a receiver-oriented selection of service. The protocols are intended for a wide-area network, with a large number of nodes, that has highly variable delays and a high message loss rate, such as the Internet. The levels of message delivery service range from unreliable unordered to group ordered with certified guarantees of message delivery. 1 Introduction Reliable totally ordered delivery of multicast messages is a useful service that simplifies the programming of distributed applications. With such a service, an application can be guaranteed that all processes in the groups that comprise the application receive the same messages in the same order. This helps to maintain the consistency of replicated inform.