03/01/1992 09:00 AM
Computer Engineering
Existing group membership mechanisms provide consistent views of membership changes. However, they require heavyweight synchronous multicast protocols. We present a new lightweight group membership mechanism that allows temporary inconsistencies in membership views. This mechanism uses *epidemic communication* techniques to ensure that all group members eventually converge to a consistent view of membership. Members can join or leave groups, and we show that the mechanism is resilient to k <= n - 2 members failing by crashing, where n is the number of members in the group.
