A Predicate-Based Approach to Dynamic Protocol Update in Group Communication

In this paper we study dynamic protocol updates (DPU), which consist in replacing, without interruption, a given protocol during execution. We focus especially on group communication protocols. The paper proposes a methodology to conveniently describe which protocols are correctly replaced by a given DPU algorithm. More precisely, our methodology characterizes DPU algorithms by a set of inference rules. To validate our approach, we illustrate our methodology with a new DPU algorithm.