Characterizing multicast orderings using concurrency control theory

Coordinating distributed executions is achieved by two widely used approaches: process groups and transactions. Typically, the two represent a trade-off in terms of the degrees of consistency and performance. By applying transaction concurrency control techniques to characterize and design process group multicast orderings, we aim to provide aspects of both ends of the trade-off. In particular, we propose a framework in which each message multicast is regarded as a transaction. Appropriate message ordering protocols are devised and shown to be correct using a variant of concurrency control theory. Also, we are able do incorporate certain aspects of application semantics for which existing process group approaches are inadequate. Finally, our framework provides a means to characterize the performance of orderings to allow a comparison of different ordering protocols.