Characterization and delivery of directly coupled causal messages in distributed systems

Authors:
Yi Zeng;Wentong Cai;Stephen J. Turner;Suiping Zhou;Bu-Sung Lee
Affiliations:
School of Computer Engineering, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore 639798, Singapore;School of Computer Engineering, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore 639798, Singapore;School of Computer Engineering, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore 639798, Singapore;School of Computer Engineering, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore 639798, Singapore;School of Computer Engineering, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore 639798, Singapore
Venue:
Future Generation Computer Systems - Special issue: Semantic grid and knowledge grid: the next-generation web
Year:
2004

Citing 9
Cited 0

Logical Time in Distributed Computing Systems

Computer - Distributed computing systems: separate resources acting as one
Lightweight causal and atomic group multicast

ACM Transactions on Computer Systems (TOCS)
An efficient implementation of vector clocks

Information Processing Letters
Understanding the limitations of causally and totally ordered communication

SOSP '93 Proceedings of the fourteenth ACM symposium on Operating systems principles
An adaptive causal ordering algorithm suited to mobile computing environments

Journal of Parallel and Distributed Computing
Time, clocks, and the ordering of events in a distributed system

Communications of the ACM
A New Algorithm to Implement Causal Ordering

Proceedings of the 3rd International Workshop on Distributed Algorithms
A Response to Cheriton and Skeen''s Criticism of Causal and Totally Ordered Communication

A Response to Cheriton and Skeen''s Criticism of Causal and Totally Ordered Communication
Detecting causal relationships in distributed computations: in search of the holy grail

Distributed Computing

Quantified Score

Hi-index	0.00

Visualization

Abstract

Causal Order (CO) is an important but basic property of message-passing based distributed systems. Violations of causal order delivery normally lead to significant inconsistencies, particularly in distributed virtual environments. However, CO is only a partial order, which captures messages that have "cause-effect" relations. It does not order concurrent messages which occur independently at different processes. This paper proposes a new relation, i.e., direct-follow relation, to characterize directly coupled causal messages and a corresponding message delivery scheme, i.e., direct-follow order (DFO) delivery. The DFO delivery effectively enforces the delivery order of certain concurrent messages and thus can be used to further eliminate inconsistencies caused by these messages. It is a stronger ordering mechanism than CO. However, as shown in the paper, messages with the direct-follow relation cannot be always delivered according to the DFO, since the ordering of concurrent messages required bythe DFO may result in conflicts in message dependency. This paper explains the motivation of defining the DFO, explores its properties and gaves the conditions under which direct-follow messages can be delivered according to the DFO.