Group communication protocol for large group

Group communication protocols which have been discussed so far can be adopted for only a small group due to the processing and communication overhead. In this paper, we discuss how to provide reliable group communication for a large number of entities interconnected by a high-speed one-channel network. A group of entities is partitioned into disjoint subgroups named component clusters interconnected by gateways in order to reduce the processing time and data unit length. The communication protocol is executed in each component cluster and the gateways forward data units to other component cluster. There exists only one gateway between every two di erent component clusters in order to prevent the proliferation of data units.