Totally ordered gigabit multicasting

Totally ordered multicast protocols are important in distributed system design, because totally ordered multicasts provide a considerably simpler programming paradigm than causally or unordered multicasts. These protocols convert the underlying unreliable and unordered message delivery provided by the network into high-quality reliable totally ordered message delivery. The emerging gigabit networks provide both ultra-high data rates and extremely low error rates. These characteristics strongly challenge the basic assumptions made for existing totally ordered multicast protocols. In this paper, we present the QuickRing multicast protocol, which provides totally ordered multicasting for the ring-based gigabit network QuickRing. The protocol is based on a buffer reservation strategy and uses timestamps both for buffer reservations and for total ordering of messages. Totally ordered multicasting implemented in hardware achieves low overhead, low latency, high throughput and low cost.