Broadcast protocols for distributed systems

An innovative approach is presented to the design of fault-tolerant distributed systems that avoids the several rounds of message exchange required by current protocols for consensus agreement. The approach is based on broadcast communication over a local area network, such as an Ethernet or a token ring, and on two novel protocols, the Trans protocol, which provides efficient reliable broadcast communication, and the Total protocol, which with high probability promptly places a total order on messages and achieves distributed agreement even in the presence of fail-stop, omission, timing, and communication faults. Reliable distributed operations, such as locking, update, and commitment, typically require only a single broadcast message rather than the several tens of messages required by current algorithms