The paper discusses a multicast mechanism using propagation trees. It guarantees the total ordering (including causal ordering) of messages in multiple groups. The mechanism introduces a concept of meta-groups (a subset of a multicast group) and organizes meta-groups into propagation trees. Compared with the existing propagation tree mechanisms, this mechanism has the following advantages: 1) Greater parallelism. Messages can be sent to destinations by using broadcast networks. 2) Less message cost and less latency time. It takes less network communication to multicast a message and less time to have the message delivered to all the destinations. 3) More flexibility to dynamic membership changes and higher reliability for message propagation. It does not need to restructure propagation trees when there is a change in membership, and a site failure does not stop the message propagation to its descendants in the tree.
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