On the Formal Specification of Group Membership Services

Emmanuelle Anceaume (1) , Bernadette Charron-Bost (1) , Pascale Minet (1) , Sam Toueg (1)

1 REFLECS - Distributed Real-Time Fault-Tolerant Computing Systems

The problem of group membership has been the focus of much theoretical and experimental work on fault-tolerant distributed systems. This has resulted in a voluminous literature and several formal specifications of this problem have been given. In this paper, we examine the two most referenced formal specifications of group membership and show that they are unsatisfactory: One has flaws in the formalism and allows undesirable executions, and the other can be satisfied by useless protocols.

Mots clés: GROUP MEMBERSHIP; ASYNCHRONOUS SYSTEMS; PRIMARY PARTITION; SINGLE GROUP VIEW; PARTITIONABLE GROUP; MULTIPLE GROUP VIEWS; SAFETY; LIVENESS

Domaines: Autre [cs.OH]

Emmanuelle Anceaume, Bernadette Charron-Bost, Pascale Minet, Sam Toueg. On the Formal Specification of Group Membership Services. [Research Report] RR-2695, INRIA. 1995. ⟨inria-00073995⟩