A token-based atomic broadcast protocol using deterministic merge

Atomic broadcast is a fundamental building block used in a variety of distributed applications. The paper presents a novel atomic broadcast protocol which is efficient in terms of both latency and throughput. And it is much more efficient when group members generate long bursts of messages. The ordering mechanism of the protocol is a combination of the deterministic merge approach and the token-based approach: the streams of messages coming from different group members are merged in a deterministic way and a virtual token is used to indicate the merge order. Simulation experiments have been performed and the results show that the protocol achieves satisfactory performance.