Reservation-Based Totally Ordered Multicasting

We present an innovative totally ordered multicast protocol that is based on reservation of buffers at the destinations and intermediate network bridges, rather than on an acknowledgment strategy. By introducing timestamps into the packets and by using a buffer reservation retract scheme, our protocol not only produces a global total order of packets but also solves the deadlock and starvation problems to which reservation-based protocols are vulnerable. A discrete event simulation demonstrates the high throughput and low latency of the protocol. 1. Introduction Modern communication networks offer very high speeds and also very high reliability, particularly when reinforced by an error-correcting code. The primary cause of packet loss in a modern high-speed network is not corruption of the packets on the communication medium, but rather lack of buffer space at the destinations and intermediate network bridges [12]. It has been shown that, even when the rate of packet loss at each node..