Reliable Communication in the Presence of Failures

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Reliable Communication in the Presence of Failures (1987)

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by Kenneth P. Birman , Thomas A. Joseph

Venue:	ACM Transactions on Computer Systems
Citations:	546 - 18 self

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@ARTICLE{Birman87reliablecommunication,
    author = {Kenneth P. Birman and Thomas A. Joseph},
    title = {Reliable Communication in the Presence of Failures},
    journal = {ACM Transactions on Computer Systems},
    year = {1987},
    volume = {5},
    pages = {47--76}
}

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Abstract

The design and correctness of a communication facility for a distributed computer system are reported on. The facility provides support for fault-tolerant process groups in the form of a family of reliable multicast protocols that can be used in both local- and wide-area networks. These protocols attain high levels of concurrency, while respecting application-specific delivery ordering constraints, and have varying cost and performance that depend on the degree of ordering desired. In particular, a protocol that enforces causal delivery orderings is introduced and shown to be a valuable alternative to conventional asynchronous communication protocols. The facility also ensures that the processes belonging to a fault-tolerant process group will observe consistent orderings of events affecting the group as a whole, including process failures, recoveries, migration, and dynamic changes to group properties like member rankings. A review of several uses for the protocols in the ISIS system, which supports fault-tolerant resilient objects and bulletin boards, illustrates the significant simplification of higher level algorithms made possible by our approach.

Keyphrases

reliable communication fault-tolerant process group dynamic change valuable alternative conventional asynchronous communication protocol reliable multicast protocol causal delivery ordering application-specific delivery computer system level algorithm isi system wide-area network consistent ordering process failure several us high level fault-tolerant resilient object bulletin board group property communication facility member ranking significant simplification

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