LSR-Based Group Communication Protocols for ATM Networks

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This research project investigates protocols to support group communication services in Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM) networks. As ATM networks are increasingly used to provide services in telecommunications networks and the Internet, there is a pressing need for flexible and extensible group communication protocols that exploit features of ATM in order to offer high performance services to group-based applications. Important issues that must be addressed in providing group services include construction and maintenance of multipoint connections, group membership management, and consensus on a group leader. This research explores novel solutions to all three problems that take advantage of the underlying link-state routing (LSR) algorithm used to support point-to-point communication. Specifically, by modeling various aspects of group communication as consensus problems under LSR, robust and efficient solutions are developed to support multiple types of multipoint connections, fault-tolerant leader/membership consensus, and even improvements to LSR itself. The resulting protocols are intended to provide new group services both within individual ATM networks as well as across interconnected, hierarchical ATM networks. Additional and updated information on this project can be found at http://www.cps.msu.edu/~mckinley/atm.