Flexible group communication protocol for distributed systems

Abstract

The group protocol has to support applications with enough quality (QoS) and types of service in change of QoS supported by the underlying network and QoS requirements of applications. A flexible group service is supported for applications by cooperation of multiple autonomous agents. A group protocol to coordinate the cooperation of the agents is composed of a collection of functions like retransmission and receipt confirmation. Each agent dynamically and autonomously takes a class of module for each protocol function in change of QoS supported by networks and required by application.