Reliable Broadcast in the Presence of Process Crash Failures

Abstract

This chapter focuses on the uniform reliable broadcast (URB) communication abstraction and its implementation in an asynchronous message-passing system prone to process crashes. This communication abstraction is central in the design and implementation of fault-tolerant distributed systems, as many non-trivial fault-tolerant distributed applications require communication with provable guarantees on message deliveries.

After defining the URB abstraction, the chapter presents a construction of it in an asynchronous message passing system prone to process crashes but with reliable channels (i.e., in the system model CAMP_n,t$[\emptyset]$). The chapter then considers two properties (related to the quality of service) that can be added to URB without requiring enrichment of the system model with additional assumptions. These properties concern the message delivery order, namely “first in first out” (FIFO) message delivery and “causal order” (CO) message delivery.