Reservation-Based Totally Ordered Multicasting

We present an innovative totally ordered multicast protocol that is based on reservation of buffers at the destinations and intermediate network bridges, rather than on an acknowledgment strategy. By introducing timestamps into the packets and by using a buffer reservation retract scheme, our protocol not only produces a global total order of packets but also solves the deadlock and starvation problems to which reservation-based protocols are vulnerable. A discrete event simulation demonstrates the high throughput and low latency of the protocol.