Slotted-FIFO Channels for Asynchronous Distributed Systems

Communication protocols designed for database applications are not necessarily suitable for other applications, like multimedia communication, due to the former's requirement of reliable and ordered communication, and the latter's ability to withstand occasional losses and misordering of messages as long as real-time communication can be supported. This paper presents the slotted-FIFO communication protocol that supports communication primitives for the entire spectrum of reliability and ordering requirements of distributed applications: FIFO as well as non-FIFO, and reliable as well as unreliable communication. Hence, the slotted-FIFO protocol is suitable for multimedia applications like MPEG video transmission and video telephony, as well as non real-time distributed applications. The protocol is simple and has low overheads. As FIFO ordering is not required for all messages, message buffering requirements are considerably reduced. Also, message latencies are lower