Design and implementation of a group membership protocol.

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Author
Raghuram, Devalla
Date
1992-09Advisor
Shukla, Shridhar B.
Second Reader
Fouts, Douglas
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Show full item recordAbstract
A group membership protocol ensures agreement and consistent commit actions
among group members to maintain a sequence of identical group views in spite of
continuous changes, either voluntary or otherwise, in processors' membership status.
In asynchronous distributed environments, such consistency among group views must
be guaranteed using messages over a network which does not bound message delivery
times. Assuming a network that only provides a reliable, FIFO channel between
any pair of processors, one approach to designing such a protocol is to centralize the
responsibility to detect changes, ensure agreement, and commit them consistently in
a single manager process. This approach is complicated by the fact that a protocol to
elect a new manager with a consistent membership proposal must be executed when
the manager itself fails. In this thesis, a membership protocol based on ordering
of group members in a logical ring that eliminates the need for such centralized responsibility is presented. Agreement and commit actions are token-based and the
protocol ensures that no tokens are lost or duplicated due to changes in membership.
It is able to process continuous changes to the membership, does not depend upon any
majority-based decisions, and processes joins and departures identically. The cost of
committing a change is always 2n point-to-point messages over FIFO channels where
n is the group size. The protocol correctness is proven in a formal framework. The
implementation details for the protocol to execute on a network of SUN workstations
are presented. Detailed examples of the behavior of the protocol for various sequences
of changes to group membership is presented. The programs for various client-server
communication patterns used for interfacing various functions are also presented.
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