Group communication protocol for large group

The authors discuss how to provide reliable group communication for a large number of entities interconnected by a high-speed one-channel network. A group of entities is partitioned into disjoint subgroups, named component clusters, interconnected by gateways, in order to reduce the processing time and data unit length. The communication protocol is executed in each component cluster, and the gateways forward data units to other component clusters. There exists only one gateway between every two different component clusters in order to prevent the proliferation of data units.