Ordered broadcasts for large applications

The problem of broadcasting messages to a large number of hosts in a network is considered. The work of propagating a message is distributed and minimized among the hosts by arranging them into a minimum-cost spanning tree. Only the cooperation of the hosts that are supposed to receive these messages is required. The proposed protocol guarantees eventual and ordered delivery despite transients, and at most k permanent failures. This is achieved without requiring a large amount of information to be stored and maintained by each host, even when many hosts may initiate broadcast. Propagation delays and message overhead are derived for the proposed protocol