Communication Protocol for Wide-area Group

Abstract

Distributed systems are composed of multiple computers interconnected by communication networks. Group communication protocol supports the ordered and reliable delivery of messages to multiple destinations in a group of processes. The group communication protocols discussed so far assume that the delay time between every two processes is almost the same. In world-wide applications using the Internet, it is essential to consider a wide-area group communication where the delay times among the processes are significantly different. We define newly a △* -causality to be applied in the wide-area group. W present a protocol which supports a group of processes with the △*-causality.