A low-level processor group membership protocol for LANs

Presents a processor group membership protocol designed to run on top of a local area network. The protocol maintains information about a selected group of stations that explicitly join the protocol by keeping a replica of a global membership table at every member. Additionally, the protocol guarantees that a given station always occupies the same entry in the table. As a result, table indexes uniquely and universally identify a station and can thus be used as short identifiers. The interest of a processor group membership is twofold: it is a powerful auxiliary for process group membership management and it provides support for efficient message addressing.<
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