Date Awarded

1993

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.)

Department

Computer Science

Advisor

Phil Kearns

Abstract

Flush communication channels, or F-channels, generalize more conventional asynchronous communication paradigms. A distributed system which uses an F-channel allows a programmer to define the delivery order of each message in relation to other messages transmitted on the channel. Unreliable datagrams and FIFO (first-in-first-out) communication channels have strictly defined delivery semantics. No restrictions are allowed on message delivery order with unreliable datagrams--message delivery is completely unordered. FIFO channels, on the other hand, insist messages are delivered in the order of their transmission. Flush channels can provide either of these delivery order semantics; in addition, F-channels allow the user to define the delivery of a message to be after the delivery of all messages previously transmitted or before the delivery of all messages subsequently transmitted or both. A system which communicates with a flush channel has a message delivery order that is a partial order.;Dynamically specifying a partial message delivery order complicates many aspects of how we implement and reason about the communication channel. From the system's perspective, we develop a feasible implementation protocol and prove its correctness. The protocol effectively handles the partially ordered message delivery. From the user's perspective, we derive an axiomatic verification methodology for flush applications. The added flexibility of defining the delivery order dynamically slightly increases the complexity for the application programmer. Our verification work helps the user effectively deal with the partially ordered message delivery in flush communication.

DOI

https://dx.doi.org/doi:10.21220/s2-d22f-0049

Rights

© The Author

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