Totally ordered reliable multicast
Kun Tan · Journal of Tsinghua University(Science and Technology) · 2001
This paper describes a reliable multicast protocol, totally ordered reliable multicast (TORM), designed for real time interactive applications, e.g., whiteboard. In addition to providing reliable data dissemination services for the application, TORM integrates a centralized currency control mechanism to ensure that messages are delivered to the application layer in a globally unique order. With this mechanism, the whiteboard application is able to maintain a consistent state among all the sites. To solve the acknowledgement implosion problem and to improve scalability, the TORM design employs a hierarchical structure in which the reliable multicast service runs as independent entities on the network. A flexible message caching strategy is also incorporated in TORM to reduce memory usage.