Efficient fault-tolerant reliable broadcast in a multi-switch extended LAN

Several efficient reliable broadcast protocols were developed and implemented on broadcast LANs. To enhance the amount of bandwidth available per node on a shared media LAN, such as 10 Mb/s Ethernet, there is a rapidly growing use of LAN switches to interconnect independent LAN segments to form an extended LAN (E-LAN). The existing reliable broadcast protocols may be inefficient in E-LANs because the LAN switch in an E-LAN transmits both broadcast and multi-cast traffic on all the segments. However, in many group applications group members may be present only on few segments. In this article, we propose some reliable broadcast protocols (RBPs) that are designed to work efficiently in multi-switch E-LANs based on the class of programmable switches. This is achieved by judiciously adding functionality to the switches. Using simple deterministic models, we study the performance characteristics of our switched RBPs. We show that they are more efficient than the existing RBPs over a wide range of conditions. (C) 1999 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.