A reliable ordered delivery protocol for interconnected local area networks

We present-the Totem multiple-ring protocol, a novel reliable ordered multicast protocol for multiple interconnected local-area networks. The protocol exhibits excellent performance and maintains a consistent network-wide total order of messages despite network partitioning and remerging, or processor failure and recovery with stable storage intact. The Totem protocol is designed for fault-tolerant distributed systems, which replicate data to guard against failures and must ensure that replicated data remain consistent despite failures. The network-wide total order of messages provided by Totem simplifies the maintenance of consistency of replicated data, and, thus, eases the development of fault-tolerant distributed systems.