Preserving Causality in a Scalable Message-Oriented Middleware

We present a solution to guarantee scalable causal ordering through matrix clocks in Message Oriented Middleware (MOM). This solution is based on a decomposition of the MOM in domains of causality, i.e. small groups of servers interconnected by router servers. We prove that, provided the domain interconnection graph has no cycles, global causal order on message delivery is guaranteed through purely local order (within domains). This allows the cost of matrix clocks maintenance to be kept linear, instead of quadratic, in the size of the application. We have implemented this algorithm in a MOM, and the performance measurements con rm the predictions.