Efficient fault-tolerant reliable broadcast in an extended LAN

Several efficient reliable broadcast protocols have been developed and implemented on broadcast LANs. To enhance the amount of bandwidth available per node on a shared media LAN, such as 10 Mb/s Ether-net, there is a rapidly growing usage of LAN switches to interconnect several independent LAN segments to form an Extended LAN (E-LAN). The existing reliable broadcast protocols may be inefficient in E-LANs because the LAN switch in an E-LAN transmits both broadcast or multicast traffic on all the segments. However, in many group applications group members may be present only on few segments. In this paper, we propose some reliable broadcast protocols (REP) that are designed to work efficiently in E-LANs. This is achieved by added functionality to a programmable switch. We develop simple deterministic models for performance of RBPs. We show that our switched RBPs are more efficient than the existing RBPs in an E-LAN.