Performance of Group Communication Services

High performance is a requirement of a large number of critical applications. As a result, the group communication services used to construct these applications must provide good overall performance in the presence as well as absence of processor or communication failures. There are five important performance indices of a group communication service: broadcast delivery time, broadcast stability time, number of messages exchanged per update broadcast, throughput, and distribution of processing load. We have performed a comparison study of several atomic broadcast protocols. Our conclusion is that there is no overall best protocol and different protocols dominate under different operating conditions. The designs of the Pinwheel and the Timewheel protocols are a result of this comparison study.

Publications

S. Mishra and S. Kuntur, Newsmonger: A Technique to Improve the Performance of Atomic Broadcast Protocols. The Journal of Systems and Software, Volume 55, Issue 2, January 2001. Abstract
S. Mishra and S. M. Kuntur, Improving Performance of Atomic Broadcast Protocols Using the Newsmonger Technique. Proceedings of the Seventh IFIP International Working Conference on Dependable Computing for Crictical Applications, San Jose, CA (January 1999), 157--176. Abstract
F. Cristian, R. De Beijer, and S. Mishra, A Performance Comparison of Asynchronous Atomic Broadcast Protocols. Distributed Systems Engineering, Vol. 1, No. 4 (June 1994), 177--201.
F. Cristian, R. De Beijer, and S. Mishra, Comparing How Well Asynchronous Atomic Broadcast Protocols Perform. Proceedings of the Third International Workshop on Responsive Computer Systems, Lincoln, NH, (Sept 1993), 192--204. Abstract