Improving performance of atomic broadcast protocols using the newsmonger technique

We propose a new technique, called the newsmonger technique, that can be applied to a large number of atomic broadcast protocols and results in improving their performance. We provide an extensive experimental evaluation of this technique by incorporating it in two existing atomic broadcast protocols, and measuring the resulting performance improvement by varying five different operating parameters: group size, interarrival time between update arrivals, communication failure probability, maximum silence period, and update arrival pattern. This evaluation shows that these techniques can decrease the average stability time of an atomic broadcast protocol by as much as 80%, without significantly affecting any other performance indices.