Collaborative group membership
In this paper we present a novel approach to fault-tolerant group membership for use predominantly in collaborative computing environments. As an exemplar, we use the Collaborative Computing Transport Layer which offers reliable atomic multicast capabilities for use in collaborative environments such as the Collaborative Computing Frameworks (CCF). Specific design goals of the approach are the elimination of processing overhead due to heartbeats, support for partial failures and extensibility. These goals are satisfied in an approach, termed Collaborative Group Membership (CGM), which uses a quiescent weak failure detector and two election based algorithms to form consensus on the membership of a failing group. Failure detection operates through a reliable multicast primitive and as such eliminates the need for explicit keep-alive packets; thus in a failure free environment, CGM imposes no overhead.
collaborative group membership group membership fault-tolerance collaborative computing group communications