Atomic broadcast ensures that concurrent updates to the state of a process group are consistently delivered to all group members despite random communication delays and failures. By relieving replicated application programmers from the burden of dealing with the di cult issue of maintaining replica state consistency, atomic broadcast is a fundamental service for implementing fault-tolerant distributed systems. This paper reports discrete event simulation results that compare the performance of ve asynchronous atomic broadcast protocols. We investigate four di erent performance indexes: average delivery time, average stability time, average number of physical messages sent per broadcast and maximum bu er size. These indexes are measured as a function of group size and update interarrival time, both in the absence of failures and in the presence of a single communication failure. Our comparison shows that there is no overall best protocol. We identify those application areas where a protocol dominates the other protocols and we discuss some of the general protocol design techniques that are useful for achieving good performance.
Cristian, Beijer, and Mishra have compared the average delivery time of Train, PA, Amoeba, and ISIS protocols as a function of the group size and the interarrival rate of messages REF .
A performance comparison of asynchronous atomic broadcast protocols
Distributed Systems Engineering
Computer Science