Maffeis S.
Bischofberger W.R.
Mätzel K.-U.

Abstract

Many nation-wide distributed applications can profit from process-groups and reliable multicast communication, but most operating systems available today fail in providing the primitive operations needed by such applications. In this paper we describe a highly configurable, generic multicast transport sevice (GTS), which supports the implementation of group based applications in wide-area settings. The GTS is unique in that it makes possible reliable, order-preserving multicast on arbitrary communication protocols, including e-mail. As another distinguishing mark, messages can be sent to processes even when they are temporarily unavailable, which is achieved by making messages persistent. We further propose an object-oriented system design consisting of adaptor objects interconnected to form a protocol tree. Adaptor objects offer a common interface to dissimilar communication protocols, and make it easy to incorporate new protocols into the GTS. Currently, the GTS is being used in a cooperative software engineering environment and in other distributed applications. The GTS is available for anonymous ftp.

[Maf94] Maffeis S., Bischofberger W.R. and Mätzel K.-U.. GTS: A Generic Multicast Transport Service. In UBILAB Technical Report 94.6.1., 1994.

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