Properties of communication modes in distributed systems

This paper studies properties of messages communication modes in distributed systems. It establishes a simple, hierarchical and homogeneous characterization of logically instantaneous, causally ordered and first-in-first-out communications. It is shown that a distributed computation obeys one of the previous communication modes iff a communication graph of messages does not include a cycle. This characterization plays a key role when one is interested in designing, analyzing, testing or debugging asynchronous distributed computations. This graph-based approach shows there is some unity in the characterization of deadlock, concurrency control, memory consistency and communication modes