Scalable Group Membership Services for Novel Applications.

Authors: Tal Anker, Gregory V. Chockler, Danny Dolev and Idit Keidar.

In Networks in Distributed Computing (DIMACS workshop). Edited by: Marios Mavronicolas, Michael Merritt, and Nir Shavit. DIMACS 45, pages 23-42. American Mathematical Society, 1998.

Abstract:

Group communication is a useful abstraction in the development of highly available distributed and communication-oriented applications in wide area networks (WANs). The most important aspects of this abstraction are the dynamic maintenance of group membership and its diverse semantics for interleaving membership change notifications within the flow of regular messages.

In this paper we propose a new architecture for a scalable group membership service for wide area environments. Our architecture provides two different service levels and their semantics, each geared to different applications with different needs: The CONGRESS membership service which provides simple semantics of membership approximation, and the MOSHE service, which extends CONGRESS, provides full virtual synchrony semantics.

The novelty of our design is in its client-server approach, which allows lightweight clients to benefit from advanced membership services. Furthermore, our design supports the coexistence of full-fledged clients along with thin clients.

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