rcs93 abstract

Group atomic broadcast is a fundamental service for implementing fault-tolerant applications. This paper reports discrete event simulation results that compare the performance of five asynchronous atomic broadcast protocols in point-to-point networks. We investigate the average time taken to deliver a message as a function of group size and message interarrival time as well as the average number of messages used to complete a broadcast. We are interested in both failure free performance, as well as performance in the presence of a single communication failure. Our comparison shows that there is no overall best protocol. We identify those application areas where a protocol dominates the other protocols.