Revisiting Token-Based Atomic Broadcast Algorithms

Many atomic broadcast algorithms have been published in the last twenty years. Token-based algorithms represent a large class of these algorithms. Interestingly all the token-based atomic broadcast algorithms rely on a group membership service, i.e., none of them uses failure detectors. The paper presents the first token-based atomic broadcast algorithm that uses an unreliable failure detector – the new failure detector denoted by R – instead of a group membership service. The failure detector R is compared with ♦P and ♦S. In order to make it easier to understand the atomic broadcast algorithm, the paper derives the atomic broadcast algorithm from a token-based consensus algorithm that also uses the failure detector R.