Using process groups to implement failure detection in asynchronous environments

Agreement on the membership of a group of processes in a distributed system is a basic problem that arises in a wide range of applications. Such groups occur when a set of processes co-operate to perform some task, share memory, monitor one another, subdivide a computation, and so forth. In this paper we discuss the Group Membership Problem as it relates to failure detection in asynchronous, distributed systems. We present a rigorous, formal specification for group membership under this interpretation. We then present a solution for this problem that improves upon previous work.