Publication:

Scalability approaches for causal multicast: a survey

Many distributed services need to be scalable: internet search, electronic commerce, e-government... In order to achieve scalability those applications rely on replicated components. Because of the dynamics of growth and volatility of customer markets, applications need to be hosted by adaptive systems. In particular, the scalability of the reliable multicast mechanisms used for supporting the consistency of replicas is of crucial importance. Reliable multicast may propagate updates in a predefined order (e.g., FIFO, total or causal). Since total order needs more communication rounds than causal order, the latter appears to be the preferable candidate for achieving multicast scalability, although the consistency guarantees based on causal order are weaker than those of total order. This paper provides a historical survey of different scalability approaches for reliable causal multicast protocols.