Protocol and Software Organization Method for Real-Time Fault-Tolerant Multicasts in Computer Networks

Background: Components of application systems based on a network of computing nodes (e.g., PC's and workstations) often maintain the client-server relationship among themselves. For the sake of attaining high system reliability and performance, servers are often replicated. These servers must then maintain strict consistency among their states. Each message from a client must be received consistently by these server replicas. Also, clients and diverse servers are often tightly coupled in the sense that they interact closely and every party should read in the same order the messages from multiple sources even if not every party reads the identical set of messages. Thus, consistent multicast communication becomes a problem when the possibilities of failures of computer and communication components are not negligible. Existing solutions are not sufficient because they guarantee neither timely reception and consistent processing of the multicast messages by the receivers, nor consistent understanding of the success or failure of a multicast among all nodes involved. Technology: The present invention is based on the notion of the official release time (ORT). Under this technique, the sender attaches the ORT to the message being multicast, thereby asking every receiver to process the message at or after the ORT. The ORT is chosen such that the probability of the multicast being completed by that time with a conclusion of success or failure subject to reasonably bounded limits of component failures, is at or above a user selected level. This invention may be defined as an improvement in a method for communication in a computer network to a plurality of receivers in a multicast session comprising the steps of transmitting a multicast message to the plurality of receivers from a sender through the computer network.

Patents:
US 7,079,535

Type of Offer: Licensing



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