An ordered and reliable broadcast protocol for distributed systems

  • Authors:

  • Ye-In Chang;Ming-Hon Hwang

  • Affiliations:

  • Dept. of Applied Mathematics, National Sun Yat-Sen University, Kaohsiung, Taiwan, ROC;Dept. of Applied Mathematics, National Sun Yat-Sen University, Kaohsiung, Taiwan, ROC

  • Venue:
  • Computer Communications
  • Year:
  • 1997

Quantified Score

Hi-index 0.24

Visualization

Abstract

The purpose of a reliable broadcast protocol is to allow groups of nodes on unreliable broadcast networks to reliably broadcast messages. A reliable broadcast protocol must guarantee two properties: (1) all of the receivers in a group receive the broadcast messages, and (2) each of the receivers orders the messages in the same sequence. In an optimistic approach to reliable broadcast protocol, a batch acknowledgement is employed for a sequence of broadcast messages, instead of one or more acknowledgements per broadcast message used in the pessimistic approach. In this paper, based on the optimistic approach, we have proposed a counter-based reliable broadcast protocol. In this protocol, the unique token ownership is circulated among all the nodes in an order specified by a token-passing-list. The system state which records related information about messages broadcast by each node is included in the token message. By appropriately updating the counter information recorded in the system state included in the token message, instead of using explicit acknowledgement messages, the proposed protocol needs fewer control messages to commit a broadcast message than other protocols, no matter whether the rate of transmission errors is high or low. Moreover, we show how to handle the flow control problem and describe the token update technique.