Architecture and protocols for a decentralized group membership service for wide-area networks

Abstract

Entities cooperating as a group become simpler to construct if they possess access to a membership service to manage and administer the membership information of such groups. This report describes the architecture and design of a wide-area group membership service. Unlike any known membership service, the semce is based on a completely decentralized protocol executed by a hierarchy of servers. This hierarchy permits a clear separation between the membership service infrastructure and support for application groups, permitting global scaleability. The membership protocol itself is executed by a core set of membership servers identified in a group-specific manner, permitting a separate name space, membership scope and partition handling for each group. We describe a suitable application programmer's interface and provide correctness arguments for the protocol. A working implementation of the basic membership protocol is described.