To appear in the DIMACS book series, proceedings of the workshop on Networks in Distributed Computing. Edited by: Marios Mavronicolas, Michael Merritt, and Nir Shavit.
In this paper we propose a new architecture for a scalable group membership service for wide area environments. Our architecture provides two different service levels and their semantics, each geared to different applications with different needs: The CONGRESS membership service which provides simple semantics of membership approximation, and the MOSHE service, which extends CONGRESS, provides full virtual synchrony semantics.
The novelty of our design is in its client-server approach, which allows lightweight clients to benefit from advanced membership services. Furthermore, our design supports the coexistence of full-fledged clients along with thin clients.