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Providing view synchrony for group communication services

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Abstract.

Building applications in a distributed computing environment is a complex process involving reasoning about message ordering, system failures, link failures etc. Group communication services attempt to make this task easier by providing building blocks to be used in assembling such systems and by defining properties that are guaranteed by these services. One such property is VS (view synchrony) which imposes restrictions on when messages can be delivered, guaranteeing that processors who share the same view of the distributed environment receive either the same set of messages or prefixes of the set received by one processor. This paper provides a precise description of an algorithm (based on ideas of Cristian and Schmuck) and a proof that this algorithm provides VS. The contributions of this paper are to show that VS is implementable and to provide an actual algorithm to implement it. We also show conditional timing properties of the algorithm, giving timebounds for group formation under certain stability conditions.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Information Technologies, University of Sydney, Australia

    N. Lesley & A. Fekete

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  1. N. Lesley
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  2. A. Fekete
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Correspondence to N. Lesley.

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Received: 15 July 2003, Published online: 21 October 2003

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Lesley, N., Fekete, A. Providing view synchrony for group communication services. Acta Informatica 40, 159–210 (2003). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00236-003-0129-4

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00236-003-0129-4

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