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Concept
Atomic broadcast
Summary
In fault-tolerant distributed computing, an atomic broadcast or total order broadcast is a broadcast where all correct processes in a system of multiple processes receive the same set of messages in the same order; that is, the same sequence of messages. The broadcast is termed "atomic" because it either eventually completes correctly at all participants, or all participants abort without side effects. Atomic broadcasts are an important distributed computing primitive.
The following properties are usually required from an atomic broadcast protocol:
Validity: if a correct participant broadcasts a message, then all correct participants will eventually receive it.
Uniform Agreement: if one correct participant receives a message, then all correct participants will eventually receive that message.
Uniform Integrity: a message is received by each participant at most once, and only if it was previously broadcast.
Uniform Total Order: the messages are totally ordered in the mathematical sense; that is, if any correct participant receives message 1 first and message 2 second, then every other correct participant must receive message 1 before message 2.
Rodrigues and Raynal and Schiper et al. define the integrity and validity properties of atomic broadcast slightly differently.
Note that total order is not equivalent to FIFO order, which requires that if a process sent message 1 before it sent message 2, then all participants must receive message 1 before receiving message 2. It is also not equivalent to "causal order", where if message 2 "depends on" or "occurs after" message 1 then all participants must receive message 2 after receiving message 1. While a strong and useful condition, total order requires only that all participants receive the messages in the same order, but does not place other constraints on that order.
Designing an algorithm for atomic broadcasts is relatively easy if it can be assumed that computers will not fail.
Official source
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