Design of a shared whiteboard component for multimedia conferencing

This paper reports on the development of a framework for multimedia applications in the domain of tele-education. The paper focuses on the protocol design of a specific component of the framework, namely a shared whiteboard application. The relationship of this component with other components of the framework is also discussed. A salient feature of the framework is that it uses an advanced ATM-based network service. The design of the shared whiteboard component is considered representative for the design as a whole, and is used to illustrate how a flexible protocol architecture utilizing innovative network functions and satisfying demanding user requirements can be developed

RGB: a scalable and reliable group membership protocol in mobile Internet

We propose a membership protocol for group commu-nications in mobile Internet. The protocol is called RGB, which is the acronym of “a Ring-based hierarchy of ac-cess proxies, access Gateways, and Border routers”. RGB runs in a parallel and distributed way in the sense that each network entity in the ring-based hierarchy maintains local information about its possible leader, previous, next, par-ent and child neighbors, and that each network entity inde-pendently collects/generates membership change informa-tion, which is propagated by the one-round membership al-gorithm concurrently running in all the logical rings. We prove that the proposed protocol is scalable in the sense that the scalability of a ring-based hierarchy is as good as that of a tree-based hierarchy. We also prove that the proposed protocol is reliable, in the sense that, with high probability of 99.500%, a ring-based hierarchy with up to 1000 access proxies attached by a large number of mobile hosts will not partition when node faulty probability is bounded by 0.1%; if at most 3 partitions are allowed, then the Function-Well probability of the hierarchy is 99.999 % accordingly. 1

Architectural Issues of JMS Compliant Group Communication

Group communication provides one-to-many communication primitives that simplify the development of highly available services. Despite advances in research and numerous prototypes, group communication stays confined to small niches. To facilitate the acceptance of group communication by a larger community, a new specification and API, called JMSGroups, based on the popular Java Message Service (JMS) has previously been presented. As a follow-up, this paper focuses on the architectural issues of the JMSGroups implementation. We consider an implementation based on a JMS server, i.e., a JMS server that is modified internally to provide a group communication service. Usually JMS server is implemented as a single entity providing its service to numerous clients. However, single server architecture is exposed to failures and is not suitable for group communication. To address this problem, we discuss the issues related to the JMS server replication (first without providing group communication). Different replicated architecture options are presented and compared. Finally, we show how to construct a fault-tolerant JMSGroups system, by extending the replicated JMS server with a group communication service

Towards JMS-Compliant Group Communication

Group communication provides communication primitives with various semantics and their use greatly simplifies the development of highly available services. However, despite tremendous advances in research and numerous prototypes, group communication stays confined to small niches and academic prototypes. In contrast, message-oriented middleware such as the Java Messaging Service (JMS) is widely used, and has become a de-facto standard. We believe that the lack of standard interfaces is the reason that hinders the deployment of group communication systems. Since JMS is well-established, an interesting solution is to map group communication primitives onto the JMS API. This requires to adapt the traditional specifications of group communication in order to take into account the features of JMS. The resulting group communication API, together with corresponding specifications, defines group communication primitives compatible with the JMS syntax and semantics

Chameleon: A Software Infrastructure and Testbed for Reliable High-Speed Networked Computing

Coordinated Science Laboratory was formerly known as Control Systems LaboratoryNASA / NAG 1-61

Atum: Scalable Group Communication Using Volatile Groups

This paper presents Atum, a group communication middleware for a large, dynamic, and hostile environment. At the heart of Atum lies the novel concept of volatile groups: small, dynamic groups of nodes, each executing a state machine replication protocol, organized in a flexible overlay. Using volatile groups, Atum scatters faulty nodes evenly among groups, and then masks each individual fault inside its group. To broadcast messages among volatile groups, Atum runs a gossip protocol across the overlay. We report on our synchronous and asynchronous (eventually synchronous) implementations of Atum, as well as on three representative applications that we build on top of it: A publish/subscribe platform, a file sharing service, and a data streaming system. We show that (a) Atum can grow at an exponential rate beyond 1000 nodes and disseminate messages in polylogarithmic time (conveying good scalability); (b) it smoothly copes with 18% of nodes churning every minute; and (c) it is impervious to arbitrary faults, suffering no performance decay despite 5.8% Byzantine nodes in a system of 850 nodes

Reliable and Total Order Broadcast in the Crash-Recovery Model

This paper addresses the problem of broadcasting messages in a reliable and totally ordered manner when processes and channels may crash and recover, or crash and never recover. We present a suite of specifications of reliable and total order broadcast primitives and we describe algorithms that implement those specifications. Our approach is modular and incremental. It is modular in the sense that the properties of broadcast primitives are first given separately and then composed: this provides a comprehensive design space for broadcast semantics. It is incremental in the sense that a broadcast algorithm implementing a given specification is obtained by transforming an algorithm that implements a weaker specification: this gives an automatic way to improve the resilience of broadcast primitives. We derive specific reliable and total order broadcast algorithms and we discuss their performance and optimality. Keywords:reliable broadcast, total order broadcast, modularity,transformation, optimisation, crash-recovery model