Hardware flooding (preliminary version)

Abstract

Traditional broadcast protocols are inappropriate for the high-speed networks of the future. Such protocols are limited by the speed of software processing, which becomes a bottleneck as network speeds increase. This paper presents a broadcast protocol that is appropriate for high-speed networks, and is tolerant of failures involving the loss of messages. The protocol is based primarily on the simple hardware functions present in a high-speed network node. This leads to message delivery at hardware speeds. In the unlikely event of a failure, some software intervention may be required to guarantee the timely termination of the protocol. However this software processing does not interfere with message delivery. We show that in the likely cases, the protocol guarantees message delivery within DT time, where D is the diameter of the network, and T is the maximum link delay.