Summary: Fast Message Ordering and Membership
Using a Logical Token­Passing Ring
Y. Amir, L. E. Moser, P. M. Melliar­Smith, D. A. Agarwal, P. Ciarfella
Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
University of California, Santa Barbara, CA 93106
Abstract
Many protocols exist to support the maintenance of
consistency of data in fault­tolerant distributed sys­
tems; these protocols are quite expensive and thus
have not been widely adopted. The Totem protocol
supports consistent concurrent operations by placing
a total order on broadcast messages. This total or­
der is achieved by including a sequence number in
a token circulated around a logical ring that is im­
posed on a set of processors in a broadcast domain.
A membership algorithm handles reconfiguration, in­
cluding restarting of a failed processor and remerging
of a partitioned network. Effective flow­control allows
the protocol to achieve message ordering rates two to
three times higher than the best prior protocols.

Source: Amir, Yair - Department of Computer Science, Johns Hopkins University
Hebrew University of Jerusalem - School of Computer Science and Engineering, Transis Project

Collections: Computer Technologies and Information Sciences; Mathematics