Group communication potocol replacement for high availability and adaptiveness

This paper introduces a new group communication component designed to provide adaptiveness and high availability in a broad sense. The key element of the system is a switching protocol that enables replacing in runtime the currently used group communication protocol by a different one. Such an architecture can take advantage of the different features of various group communication protocols by selecting the most favorable one under particular circumstances and dynamically changing from the current one to it. The system we propose wraps a set of independent group communication protocols, offering to the user application a single group communication interface. A switching protocol implements the mechanism of replacing the currently used group communication protocol with another one, and policies to decide when a particular protocol change should take place are envisioned as separate components. This paper focuses on the architecture, shows its components and describes a basic switching protocol that serves as a proof of concept of runtime group communication protocol replacements.