An efficient decentralized approach to processor-group membership maintenance in real-time LAN systems: the PRHB/ED scheme

In constructing highly reliable LAN systems, a mechanism that enables every active node to maintain timely and consistent knowledge about the health status of all cooperating nodes can be used as a cornerstone. The authors consider the case where maintenance of such knowledge is achieved in a decentralized manner and timely and consistent recognition of newly joining nodes is also facilitated. The authors develop an optimal version of H. Kopetz et al.'s (1985) periodic reception history broadcast (PRHB) method. The authors' version enables detection of failures with minimum latency and is called the PRHB with earliest detection (PRHB/ED). This scheme has much shorter latency than the previous PRHB scheme and is yet equally practical in the sense that it does not increase the communication traffic at all, and the complexity of the algorithm for analyzing the observations exchanged among the active nodes is still bounded by a linear function of the number of nodes in the system