An Efficient, NACK-based Multipoint Communication Protocol for the Mojavecomm Group Communication Protocol

Developing a distributed system is difficult, as one wants it to have reasonable semantics, to scale well, to perform well, and to be reliable and fault tolerant goals which often oppose one another. To this end, the Mojavecomm framework is a system for reliable and fault tolerant group communication. While there exist protocols for reliable point-to-point communication between nodes, they do not scale well as the number of nodes increases, thereby limiting the scalability of a system that makes use of them. This project provides Mojavecomm with a reliable, multipoint to multipoint protocol a protocol that is able to inform higher layers of both successful and failed message transmission attempts. The protocol is implemented on top of IP multicast, and aims both to be scalable and to perform well.