Implementation of efficient and reliable multicast servers

Reliable multicast services in a group of autonomous distributed processes/sites are desirable to maintain the consistent state of shared information accessed by transactions in distributed systems. Many existing protocols are complicated and thus quite expensive and not efficient for availability of distributed systems. This paper discusses the design and implementations of a new logical token ring based multicast communications services. It provides total ordering, atomicity of multicast messages, membership and fault-tolerant services in the presence of sites fail stop and network partitioning. An unique feature of the protocol is that all members, knowing exactly, in the group, who holds the token, are able to detect right order of a multicast message, thereby, reducing the synchronous overhead, preventing possible token lose problem and minimizing control messages. The services are implemented by using finite state machine approach and they are highly efficient comparing with related services in the same network settings. © 1997 IEEE