Group communication

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The term group communication refers to a programming paradigm used in the context of data or service replication.

Processes form groups based on the similarity of interest. Individual groups may correspond to the particular services, or to particular data objects. Example of this include a group of processes that can view or edit a document, a group of processes that maintain replicas of a database, a group of processes that represent players in a massive multiplayer game that reside in the particular room in a castle, or a group of nodes in a trading system that process events related to the given stock.

The paradigm relies on multicast as the basic mechanism via which processes in the group communicate. The multicasts typically carry messages that describe updates to the state or data shared by processes in the group. The multicast protocol used typically provides strong reliability properties.