Reliable broadcast protocols

Abstract

A number of broadcast protocols that are reliable subject to a variety of ordering and delivery guarantees are considered. Developing applications that are distributed over a number of sites and/or must tolerate the failures of some of them becomes a considerably simpler task when such protocols are available for communication. Without such protocols the kinds of distributed applications that can reasonably be built will have a very limited scope. As the trend towards distribution and decentralization continues, it will not be surprising if reliable broadcast protocols have the same role in distributed operating systems of the future that message passing mechanisms have in the operating systems of today. On the other hand, the problems of engineering such a system remain large. For example, deciding which protocol is the most appropriate to use in a certain situation or how to balance the latency-communication-storage costs is not an easy question.