Abstract
Group and multicast communication provide basic functions for many applications in distributed computing. In such a communication, the causal ordering property among messages should hold throughout distributed sites. Several communication protocols for this purpose have been designed so far. They are designed mostly under the strong assumptions: there is no loss of messages in the communication channel or the order of the messages is preserved or both.
However, in WAN environment, it is desirable to design such a protocol without assuming these conditions from the efficiency point of view.
In this paper, a protocol which provides the causal ordered broadcast in a nonβFIFO network is investigated. The nonβFIFO network is defined as the network in which there exists possibilities of loss and disorder of messages. The purpose of this paper is to perform experimental evaluations to a causal ordering protocol which is specially designed for a nonβFIFO network.
The protocol is implemented as a software system, and the performance evaluation of the system is done by experiments. In addition, a simple approximation of the queue length of the system is proposed. The applicability of the approximation also is investigated.