Design and implementation of a membership server and its application interface

摘要

None of the existing membership protocols have all the properties needed to be reliable and fault-tolerant. Therefore, the goal of this work is to implement two major components of a group Membership Service protocol which will provide distributed applications the necessary fault tolerance, reliable communications and consistent group views among all members. These protocols must operate on top of a usually unreliable and best effort network such as the Internet. The first component implements a multicast emulator, to emulate IP multicasting communication over a mixture of multicast-capable and unicast capable local area networks (LANs). The second component implements a membership server that maintains the group memberships using the Membership Service protocol. These components are implemented as programs and then verified to be faithful to the specifications through extensive testing of all possible paths through the program (all combinations of scenarios)