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Scalability approaches for causal multicast: a survey

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Abstract

Many distributed services need to be scalable: internet search, electronic commerce, e-government\(\ldots \) In order to achieve scalability those applications rely on replicated components. Because of the dynamics of growth and volatility of customer markets, applications need to be hosted by adaptive systems. In particular, the scalability of the reliable multicast mechanisms used for supporting the consistency of replicas is of crucial importance. Reliable multicast may propagate updates in a pre-defined order (e.g., FIFO, total or causal). Since total order needs more communication rounds than causal order, the latter appears to be the preferable candidate for achieving multicast scalability, although the consistency guarantees based on causal order are weaker than those of total order. This paper provides a historical survey of different scalability approaches for reliable causal multicast protocols.

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Notes

  1. Vector clocks are compared as follows:

    \(VC(a) \le VC(b)\) iff \(\forall i, i \in \{1..n\} : VC(a)[i] \le VC(b)[i]\), and

    \( VC(a) < VC(b)\) iff \(VC(a) \le VC(b) \wedge \exists i : VC(a)[i] < VC(b)[i]\).

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Acknowledgments

This work was supported by European Regional Development Fund (FEDER) and Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad (MINECO) under research Grant TIN2012-37719-C03-01.

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  1. Instituto Universitario Mixto Tecnológico de Informática, Universitat Politècnica de València, 46022, Valencia, Spain

    Rubén de Juan-Marín, Hendrik Decker, José M. Bernabéu-Aubán & Francesc D. Muñoz-Escoí

  2. Depto. de Ingeniería Matemática e Informática, Universidad Pública de Navarra, 31006, Pamplona, Spain

    José Enrique Armendáriz-Íñigo

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  1. Rubén de Juan-Marín
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de Juan-Marín, R., Decker, H., Armendáriz-Íñigo, J.E. et al. Scalability approaches for causal multicast: a survey. Computing 98, 923–947 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00607-015-0479-0

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