Network Membership: A Partition Model for Reliable Mobile Communication

We give a formal specification of a new model called Network Membership for reliable mobile communication in asynchronous distributed systems. Our approach is new in the sense that the Network Membership service does not have any join or leave procedures. We let the system flow, views are not forced and are installed with stability. The model is less restrictive than others since no consensus is required. The Network Membership allows multiple partitions to operate simultaneously and provides connectivity feedback. We have build on top of this Network Membership service an efficient reliable broadcast service that is resistant to network partitions. The protocol insures that all recipients eventually receive the message even if a receiver has been partitioned away at any time. We show how we use an unreliable channel detector in conjunction with data forwarding and stability to achieve this goal.