Ordered Delivery over One-way Virtual Circuits

Abstract

We present a family of transport protocols for transmitting messages from a sender process to a receiver process over multiple one-way channels (that represent virtual circuits). Each channel may lose but not reorder nor duplicate messages. The sender process distributes its messages among the channels in a round-robin manner for purposes of load balancing and fault-tolerance. The receiver process receives messages from the different channels in arbitrary order, but it delivers them in the same order in which they were sent, despite the fact that some messages may have been lost during transmission. The protocols in our protocol family support two delivery requirements: no deadline delivery, in which the receiver may wait to receive a message from each channel before delivering the next message, and deadline delivery, in which each message is to be delivered before a given deadline.