PSP: a persistent streaming protocol for transactional communications

In a distributed environment, many applications require reliable and fault-tolerant communications. While most transactional techniques rely on either a 2-phase commit protocol or checkpointing, neither of these solutions is suitable for large batch processing applications. We describe the persistent streaming protocol (PSP) that guarantees fault-tolerant communications between a sender and one or multiple receivers. An application that uses PSP sends data only once, and they eventually reach their destinations regardless of system or network failures. We first describe PSP and then the prototype implementation.