PERFORMANCE EVALUATION OF THREE ROUND MAJORITY GROUP MEMBERSHIP PROTOCOL

Abstract

Any service offered to a client needs fault-tolerance, availability, dependability and/or real time responsiveness. All these requirements can be satisfied by maintaining by a consistent group of application servers instead of a single one. Instead of overloading the application severs by including in it the functionality of group maintenance it is beneficial to have a separate process that maintains the group. Such a process is called group communication server and service provided by it is called group communication service. This dissertation deals with implementation of a group membership protocol ("The Three Round Majority Group Membership Protocol") having real time responsiveness, which is part of group communication service and to study the performance of the protocol. It uses different stabilization times i.e., "Initialization stabilization time", "Failure stabilization time", and "Recovery stabilization time", as performance indices. We also proposed a method to extend the above-referred protocol for soft real-time systems and at the same time enhance its performance by reducing the overall control traffic generated for the purpose of the group maintenance. The selection of a protocol greatly depends on the requirements of the application.