P. Veríssimo, L. Rodrigues, and J. Marques.
From the Proceedings of the FOC/LAN 87 Conference, Anaheim-USA, October 1987.
The present paper describes an approach to achieve dependable multicast communication on token-bus LAN through extensions to the standard 802.4 protocol. The protocol implements atomic multicast services, not conflicting, and coexisting with standard stations and respective services, which are executed efficiently through embedding multicast mechanisms on the low-level of the communication. Multi-casting is achieved transparently through MAC logical addressing. By this way, we state we have a potentially interesting solution, by using a standard network, and allowing a incremental level of dependability in communications, to be introduced in a open way. Although specially interesting for Fault-Tolerant LAN based Distributed Systems, the environment described may find use in industrial applications, like MAP.
Not available in postscript.