This paper examines the problem of building scalable, fault-tolerant distributed systems from collections of communicating process groups, while maintaining well-defined end-to-end delivery semantics. We propose a new architecture which supports modular group composition by providing a distinction between intra-group and inter-group communication. With this architecture, multiple group communication protocols and end-to-end delivery semantics can be used in a single system. These features reduce the complexity of ordering messages in a group composition, resulting in enhanced scalability. Finally, we present simulation results comparing the performance of a group composition using our architecture to that of a single process group.
Index Terms:
Group communication, fault-tolerant communication, scalable multicast, distributed systems, ordering semantics
Citation:
Scott Johnson, Farnam Jahanian, Jigney Shah, "The Inter-group Router Approach to Scalable Group Composition," icdcs, pp.0004, 19th IEEE International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems (ICDCS'99), 1999