On-Demand Asynchronous Atomic Broadcast

We propose a new asynchronous atomic broadcast protocol that provides good performance for applications with bursty update patters. If the members of a process group disseminate bursts of updates that tend to be disjoint in time, our protocol uses a small number of physical messages to accomplish a broadcast, and provides excellent update delivery and stability times. The protocol is tolerant of omission/performance communication failures and crash/performance process failures. The initial performance measurements made for a portable implementation on top of the UDP data-gram service connrm the suitability of the protocol for bursty update dissemination patterns.