A causal multicast protocol for mobile distributed systems

Causal message ordering in the context of group communication ensures that all the message receivers observe consistent ordering of events affecting a group as a whole. This paper presents a scalable causal multicast protocol for mobile distributed computing systems. In our protocol, only a part of the mobility agents in the system is involved in group computations and the resulting size of control information in messages can be kept small. Our protocol can outperform qualitatively the counterparts in terms of communication overhead and hand-off complexity. An analytical model is also developed to evaluate our proposal. The performance results show that the proposed protocol is promising.