[dsnp-interest] alternative to broadcast message ACKs

[Adrian Thurston]

I have recently been interested in using acknowledgement messages to communicate back to the originator of a broadcast message that it has been received by all members of the broadcast network. I like this idea, but it introduces quite a bit of complexity in the form of timers and additional points of failure that require recover strategies.

As an alternative I'm experimenting with a redundancy scheme that should increase the probabily that that messages will reach all memebers, in the face of members who agree to forward messages, but fail to do so.

I'd like to use two broadcast trees, building one in a top down order, and the other bottom up. Then for each pair of nodes, A and B in one of the broadcast trees, where B depends on A, it is not the case that B depends on A in the other.

-Adrian