Partitionable Group Membership: Specification and Algorithms
Özalp Babaoğlu, Renzo Davoli, Alberto Montresor · 1997
We give a formal specification for a partionable group membership service in asynchronous distributed systems. Our specification is motivated by the requirements for building partition-aware applications that can continue operating without blocking in multiple concurrent partitions and reconfigure themselves dynamically when partitions merge. The specified service is sound in the sense that it guarantees liveness, excludes trivial solutions and is implementable in practical asynchronous distributed systems where certain stability conditions hold.