A counter-based reliable broadcast protocol

The purpose of a reliable broadcast protocol is to allow groups of nodes on unreliable broadcast networks to reliably broadcast messages. A reliable broadcast protocol must guarantee two properties: all of the receivers in a group receive the broadcast messages, and each of the receivers order the messages in the same sequence. In an optimistic approach to reliable broadcast protocol, a batch acknowledgement is employed for a sequence of broadcast messages, instead of one or more acknowledgement per broadcast message used in the pessimistic approach. Based on the optimistic approach, we propose a counter based reliable broadcast protocol. In this protocol, the unique token ownership is circulated among all the nodes in an order specified by a token passing list. The system state which records related information about messages broadcast by each node is included in the token message. By appropriately updating the counter information recorded in the system state included in the token message, instead of using explicit acknowledgement messages, the proposed protocol needs fewer control messages to commit a broadcast message than other protocols no matter the rate of transmission errors is high or low