Abstract

This paper presents a membership protocol for maintaining the set of operational and connected machines in agreement. The protocol operates in an asynchronous environment prone to crash failures, omission failures and network partitions. The protocol is suitable for systems with machines that communicate via broadcast (or multicast) messages. It supports continued operation with partitions and provides the mechanism for merging of partitions. The principles of the protocol presented here have been successfully incorporated into the Transis system [3, 2], the Totem system [4], and the Horus system [29]. The membership protocol presented here is integrated in the communication system, such that the notifications of membership changes are delivered to the application among the stream of regular messages. Changes to the membership are coordinated with the delivery of regular messages in the system. This valuable approach was presented in [7, 9] in the context of a primary-partition system,...

Citations