A Group Communication Protocol for Autonomic Computing

We discuss a group protocol which supports applications with group communication service when QoS supported by networks or required by applications is changed. An autonomic group protocol is realized by cooperation of multiple autonomous agents. Each agent autonomously takes a class of each protocol function to support only and all QoS required by applications. Classes taken by an agent are required to be consistent with the other agents but might be different from the others. A group is composed of smaller subgroups named views for realizing the scalability. Each view is a subset of the agents in a group, where the agents autonomously take protocol classes consistent with each other. We make clear what combination of classes can be autonomously taken by agents. We also discuss how to autonomously change retransmission classes and evaluate it in terms of delivery time of messages.