Group Communication in Partitionable Systems: Specification and Algorithms

Gives a formal specification and an implementation for a partitionable group communication service in asynchronous distributed systems. Our specification is motivated by the requirements for building "partition-aware" applications that can continue operating without blocking in multiple concurrent partitions and can reconfigure themselves dynamically when partitions merge. The specified service guarantees liveness and excludes trivial solutions, it constitutes a useful basis for building realistic partition-aware applications, and it is implementable in practical asynchronous distributed systems where certain stability conditions hold.

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