Large-Scale Group Communication Protocol on High-Speed Channel

Group communication protocols discussed so far can be adopted for only a small group from the processing and communication overhead point of view. In this paper, we discuss how to provide a large-scale reliable group communication among several hundreds entities interconnected by a high-speed one-channel network. A group of entities is partitioned into disjoint subgroups named component clusters interconnected by gateways. The group communication protocol is executed in each component cluster and the gateways forward data units from a component cluster to the others. There exists only one gateway between every two di erent component clusters in order to prevent the proliferation and inde nite circulation of data units. By this protocol, the processing time and the length of data units of each entity can be reduced because each component cluster is smaller than the group.