Providing ordered message delivery in communication network systems

Due to the character of the original source materials and the nature of batch digitization, quality control issues may be present in this document. Please report any quality issues you encounter to digital@library.tamu.edu, referencing the URI of the item.Includes bibliographical references.Issued also on microfiche from Lange Micrographics.Many previous papers about network protocols have focused their attention on totally non-FIFO networks where packets may be delivered arbitrarily out of order relative to their sending order. More realistic networks have a more bounded or limited non-FIFO behavior where the degree of reordering that can occur is constrained. We intend to model the behavior of this more realistic non-FIFO network with an abstract concept, a k-bounded non-FIFO network. The variable k will indicate the degree of non-FIFO behavior. Our contribution will be to present a protocol that provides a losing FIFO packet delivery service on top of a k-bounded losing non-FIFO network, assuming k is known and no network nodes crash