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Theory and Practice in Distributed Systems pp 33–57Cite as

A high performance totally ordered multicast protocol

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Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNCS,volume 938))

Abstract

This paper presents the Reliable Multicast Protocol (RMP). RMP provides a totally ordered, reliable, atomic multicast service on top of an unreliable multicast datagram service such as IP Multicasting. RMP is fully and symmetrically distributed so that no site bears an undue portion of the communication load. RMP provides a wide range of guarantees, from unreliable delivery to totally ordered delivery, to K-resilient, majority resilient, and totally resilient atomic delivery. These QoS guarantees may be selected on a per packet basis. RMP provides many communication options, including virtual synchrony, a publisher/subscriber model of message delivery, a client/server model of delivery, an implicit naming service, mutually exclusive handlers for messages, and mutually exclusive locks.

It has commonly been held that a large performance penalty must be paid in order to implement total ordering—RMP discounts this. On SparcStation5's on a 1250 KB/sec Ethernet, RMP provides totally ordered packet delivery to one destination at 1070 KB/sec throughput and with 4.0 ms packet latency. The performance stays roughly constant independent of the number of destinations. For two or more destinations on a LAN, RMP provides higher throughput than any protocol that does not use multicast or broadcast.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of California at Berkeley, USA

    Brian Whetten

  2. West Virginia University, USA

    Todd Montgomery

  3. University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana, USA

    Simon Kaplan

Authors
  1. Brian Whetten
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  2. Todd Montgomery
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  3. Simon Kaplan
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Editor information

Kenneth P. Birman Friedemann Mattern André Schiper

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© 1995 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

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Whetten, B., Montgomery, T., Kaplan, S. (1995). A high performance totally ordered multicast protocol. In: Birman, K.P., Mattern, F., Schiper, A. (eds) Theory and Practice in Distributed Systems. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 938. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-60042-6_3

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-60042-6_3

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-540-60042-8

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-540-49409-6

  • eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive

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