Scalable group communication supporting configurable levels of consistency

Group communication is deployed in many evolving Internet‐scale cooperative applications such as multiplayer online games and virtual worlds to efficiently support interaction on information relevant to a potentially very large number of users or objects. Especially peer‐to‐peer based group communication protocols have evolved as a promising approach to allow intercommunication between many distributed peers. Yet, the delivery semantics of robust and scalable protocols such as gossiping is not sufficient to support consistency semantics beyond eventual consistency because no relationship on the order of events is enforced. On the other hand, traditional consistency models provided by reliable group communication providing causal or even total order are restricted to support only small groups.

[1]  Ajay D. Kshemkalyani,et al.  Necessary and sufficient conditions on information for causal message ordering and their optimal implementation , 1998, Distributed Computing.

[2]  D. C. Miller,et al.  SIMNET: the advent of simulator networking , 1995, Proc. IEEE.

[3]  Anne-Marie Kermarrec,et al.  Lightweight probabilistic broadcast , 2003, TOCS.

[4]  Steve Benford,et al.  A Multicast Network Architecture for Large Scale Collaborative Virtual Environments , 1997, ECMAST.

[5]  David R. Karger,et al.  Chord: A scalable peer-to-peer lookup service for internet applications , 2001, SIGCOMM '01.

[6]  Boris Koldehofe,et al.  Buffer management in probabilistic peer-to-peer communication protocols , 2003, 22nd International Symposium on Reliable Distributed Systems, 2003. Proceedings..

[7]  Kenneth P. Birman,et al.  Reliable communication in the presence of failures , 1987, TOCS.

[8]  Michael Dahlin,et al.  BAR gossip , 2006, OSDI '06.

[9]  Ben Y. Zhao,et al.  Bayeux: an architecture for scalable and fault-tolerant wide-area data dissemination , 2001, NOSSDAV '01.

[10]  Kien A. Hua,et al.  A peer-to-peer architecture for media streaming , 2004, IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications.

[11]  Mukesh Singhal,et al.  Efficient Δ-causal broadcasting , 1998 .

[12]  Rachid Guerraoui,et al.  How robust are gossip-based communication protocols? , 2007, OPSR.

[13]  Bernadette Charron-Bost,et al.  Concerning the Size of Logical Clocks in Distributed Systems , 1991, Inf. Process. Lett..

[14]  Kenneth P. Birman,et al.  Bimodal multicast , 1999, TOCS.

[15]  Hui Zhang,et al.  A case for end system multicast (keynote address) , 2000, SIGMETRICS '00.

[16]  Miguel Castro,et al.  SCRIBE: The Design of a Large-Scale Event Notification Infrastructure , 2001, Networked Group Communication.

[17]  Leslie Lamport,et al.  Time, clocks, and the ordering of events in a distributed system , 1978, CACM.

[18]  Seif Haridi,et al.  Multicast in DKS(N, k, f) Overlay Networks , 2003, OPODIS.

[19]  Ben Y. Zhao,et al.  Tapestry: a resilient global-scale overlay for service deployment , 2004, IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications.

[20]  Russ Bubley,et al.  Randomized algorithms , 1995, CSUR.

[21]  Mark Handley,et al.  A scalable content-addressable network , 2001, SIGCOMM '01.

[22]  Antony I. T. Rowstron,et al.  Pastry: Scalable, Decentralized Object Location, and Routing for Large-Scale Peer-to-Peer Systems , 2001, Middleware.

[23]  Kirk L. Johnson,et al.  Overcast: reliable multicasting with on overlay network , 2000, OSDI.

[24]  Gil Neiger,et al.  Causal memory: definitions, implementation, and programming , 1995, Distributed Computing.

[25]  André Schiper,et al.  The Causal Ordering Abstraction and a Simple Way to Implement it , 1991, Inf. Process. Lett..

[26]  Jonas Ådahl,et al.  Shared Resource for Collaborative Editing over a Wireless Network , 2011 .

[27]  Anne-Marie Kermarrec,et al.  Probabilistic Reliable Dissemination in Large-Scale Systems , 2003, IEEE Trans. Parallel Distributed Syst..

[28]  Friedemann Mattern,et al.  Virtual Time and Global States of Distributed Systems , 2002 .

[29]  Mark Wallace,et al.  Second Life: The Official Guide , 2006 .

[30]  Wolfgang Effelsberg,et al.  Performance Evaluation of Peer-to-Peer Gaming Overlays , 2010, 2010 IEEE Tenth International Conference on Peer-to-Peer Computing (P2P).

[31]  Colin J. Fidge,et al.  Timestamps in Message-Passing Systems That Preserve the Partial Ordering , 1988 .

[32]  Nir Shavit,et al.  A bounded first-in, first-enabled solution to the l-exclusion problem , 1994, TOPL.

[33]  Anne-Marie Kermarrec,et al.  NEEM: network-friendly epidemic multicast , 2003, 22nd International Symposium on Reliable Distributed Systems, 2003. Proceedings..

[34]  André Schiper,et al.  Lightweight causal and atomic group multicast , 1991, TOCS.

[35]  Michel Raynal,et al.  Deadline-constrained causal order , 2000, Proceedings Third IEEE International Symposium on Object-Oriented Real-Time Distributed Computing (ISORC 2000) (Cat. No. PR00607).

[36]  Christer Carlsson,et al.  DIVE A multi-user virtual reality system , 1993, Proceedings of IEEE Virtual Reality Annual International Symposium.

[37]  Amin Vahdat,et al.  Bullet: high bandwidth data dissemination using an overlay mesh , 2003, SOSP '03.

[38]  Marina Papatriantafilou,et al.  Dynamic and fault-tolerant cluster management , 2005, Fifth IEEE International Conference on Peer-to-Peer Computing (P2P'05).

[39]  Marina Papatriantafilou,et al.  Lightweight Causal Cluster Consistency , 2005, IICS.

[40]  Boris Koldehofe,et al.  Simple gossiping with balls and bins , 2004, Stud. Inform. Univ..

[41]  Kurt Rothermel,et al.  Event processing for large-scale distributed games , 2010, DEBS '10.

[42]  Shlomi Dolev,et al.  Self-stabilizing l-exclusion , 2001, Theor. Comput. Sci..