There is, I think, something ethereal about i —the square root of minus one. I remember first hearing about it at school. It seemed an odd beast at that time—an intruder hovering on the edge of reality.

Usually familiarity dulls this sense of the bizarre, but in the case of i it was the reverse: over the years the sense of its surreal nature intensified. It seemed that it was impossible to write mathematics that described the real world in …

I and i

This article attempts to introduce some discipline and order in understanding fault-tolerance issues in distributed system architectures. This article examines various proposals, discusses their relative merits, and illustrates their use in existing commercial fault-tolerant systems

Understanding fault-tolerant distributed systems

View-oriented group communication is an important and widely used building block for many distributed applications. Much current research has been dedicated to specifying the semantics and services of view-oriented group communication systems (GCSs). However, the guarantees of different GCSs are formulated using varying terminologies and modeling techniques, and the specifications vary in their rigor. This makes it difficult to analyze and compare the different systems. This survey provides a comprehensive set of clear and rigorous specifications, which may be combined to represent the guarantees of most existing GCSs. In the light of these specifications, over 30 published GCS specifications are surveyed. Thus, the specifications serve as a unifying framework for the classification, analysis, and comparison of group communication systems. The survey also discusses over a dozen different applications of group communication systems, shedding light on the usefulness of the presented specifications. This survey is aimed at both system builders and theoretical researchers. The specification framework presented in this article will help builders of group communication systems understand and specify their service semantics; the extensive survey will allow them to compare their service to others. Application builders will find a guide here to the services provided by a large variety of GCSs, which could help them choose the GCS appropriate for their needs. The formal framework may provide a basis for interesting theoretical work, for example, analyzing relative strengths of different properties and the costs of implementing them.

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Group communication specifications: a comprehensive study

Total order broadcast and multicast (also called atomic broadcast/multicast) present an important problem in distributed systems, especially with respect to fault-tolerance. In short, the primitive ensures that messages sent to a set of processes are, in turn, delivered by all those processes in the same total order.

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Total order broadcast and multicast algorithms: Taxonomy and survey

Inter-vehicle communication (IVC) protocols have the potential to increase the safety, efficiency, and convenience of transportation systems involving planes, trains, automobiles, and robots. The applications targeted include peer-to-peer networks for web surfing, coordinated braking, runway incursion prevention, adaptive traffic control, vehicle formations, and many others. The diversity of the applications and their potential communication protocols has challenged a systematic literature survey. We apply a classification technique to IVC applications to provide a taxonomy for detailed study of their communication requirements. The applications are divided into type classes which share common communication organization and performance requirements. IVC protocols are surveyed separately and their fundamental characteristics are revealed. The protocol characteristics are then used to determine the relevance of specific protocols to specific types of IVC applications.

A survey of inter-vehicle communication protocols and their applications

A general purpose group communication protocol suite called Newtop is described. It is assumed that processes can simultaneously belong to many groups, group size could be large, and processes could be communicating over the Internet. Asynchronous communication environment is therefore assumed where message transmission times cannot be accurately estimated, and the underlying network may well get partitioned, preventing functioning processes from communicating with each other. Newtop can provide causality preserving total order delivery to members of a group, ensuring that total order delivery is preserved for multi-group processes. Both symmetric and asymmetric order protocols are supported, permitting a process to use say symmetric version in one group and asymmetric version in other.

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Newtop: a fault-tolerant group communication protocol

A fail-silent node is a self-checking node that either functions correctly or stops functioning after an internal failure is detected. Such a node can be constructed from a number of conventional processors. In a software-implemented fail-silent node, the nonfaulty processors of the node need to execute message order and comparison protocols to "keep in step" and check each other, respectively. In this paper, the design and implementation of efficient protocols for a two processor fail-silent node are described in detail. The performance figures obtained indicate that in a wide class of applications requiring a high degree of fault tolerance, software-implemented fail-silent nodes constructed simply by utilizing standard "off-the-shelf" components are an attractive alternative to their hardware-implemented counterparts that do require special-purpose hardware components, such as fault-tolerant clocks, comparator, and bus interface circuits.

Implementing fail-silent nodes for distributed systems

Many fault-tolerant distributed applications can be structured as one or more groups of objects that cooperate by multicasting invocations on member objects. The building of group based applications is considerably simplified if the members of a group can multicast reliably and have a mutually consistent view of the order in which events (such as invocations, host machine failures) have taken place. With this observation in mind, this paper describes the design and implementation of a CORBA middleware service for managing object groups. The object group service is portable and intended for a wide variety of applications; objects can simultaneously belong to many groups, group size could be large, and objects could be geographically widely separated. The service can provide causality preserving total order delivery to members of a group, ensuring that total order delivery is preserved even for multi-group objects. Both symmetric and asymmetric total order protocols are supported, permitting a member to use say symmetric version in one group and asymmetric version in another group simultaneously. The service is both dynamic and fault-tolerant: ordering and liveness is preserved even if membership changes occur due to (real or suspected) member failures, voluntary member departures and new group formations.

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Design and implemantation of a CORBA fault-tolerant object group service

A VOLTAN node is composed of a number of conventional processors on which application-level processes are replicated to achieve fault-tolerance. The architecture of a family of such nodes with differing functionalities is presented. These include failure-masking, fail-signal, and fail-silent nodes. The software architectures of a three-processor failure-masking and a two-processor fail-silent node are discussed in detail. The suitability of VOLTAN nodes as building blocks of reliable distributed systems is also discussed. >

Principal features of the VOLTAN family of reliable node architectures for distributed systems

Providing reliable multicast is a basic requirement to build more advanced distributed protocols such as total order or leader election, and much research has gone into providing this functionality for wired networks. However, the protocols developed for wired networks tend to be unsuitable for deployment on mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs), as these do not take into account the node mobility or increased sensitivity to network load and conges-

/pdf/a-survey-of-reliable-broadcast-protocols-for-mobile-ad-hoc-shzyfip0zk.pdf

Paul D. Ezhilchelvan

Papers

Newtop: a fault-tolerant group communication protocol

Implementing fail-silent nodes for distributed systems

Design and implemantation of a CORBA fault-tolerant object group service

Principal features of the VOLTAN family of reliable node architectures for distributed systems

A Survey of Reliable Broadcast Protocols for Mobile Ad-hoc Networks