Abstract
While the previous chapter was devoted to communication abstractions on message ordering, this chapter is on synchronous communication (also called logically instantaneous communication, or rendezvous, or interaction). This abstraction adds synchronization to communication. More precisely, it requires that, for a message to be sent by a process, the receiver has to be ready to receive it. From an external observer point view, the message transmission looks instantaneous: The sending and the reception of a message appear as a single event (and the sense of the communication could have been in the other direction). From an operational point of view, we have the following: For each pair of processes, the first process that wants to communicate—be it the sender or the receiver—has to wait until the other process is ready to communicate.
This chapter first defines synchronous communication and introduces a characterization based on a specific message pattern called a crown. It then presents several implementations of this communication abstraction, each suited to a specific context. It also describes implementations for real-time rendezvous in the context of synchronous message-passing systems. In this case, each process is required to associate a deadline with each of its rendezvous.
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Raynal, M. (2013). Rendezvous (Synchronous) Communication. In: Distributed Algorithms for Message-Passing Systems. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-38123-2_13
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