A low-cost processor group membership protocol for a hard real-time distributed system

Processor group membership protocols implement a service that allow processors to agree on which processors are operational. Implementations of group membership for hard real-time systems have concentrated on either reducing failure detection latency or minimizing message complexity. Instead, we present a protocol that uses shared resources-processor time and network bandwidth-as a small, bounded tax imposed on existing broadcast message traffic. In doing so, the group membership protocol can easily be taken into account by any schedulability analysis.