A set of algorithms based on characteristic discontinuous Galerkin methods is presented for tracer transport on the sphere. The algorithms are designed to reduce MPI communication volume per unit of simulated time relative to current methods generally and to the spectral element scheme employed by the U.S. Dept. of Energy's Exascale Earth System Model (E3SM) model specifically. Two methods are developed to enforce discrete mass conservation when the transport schemes are coupled to a separate dynamics solver, constrained transport and Jacobian-combined transport. A communication-efficient method is introduced to enforce tracer consistency between the transport scheme and dynamics solver; this method also provides the transport scheme's shape preservation capability. A subset of the algorithms derived here is implemented in E3SM and shown to improve transport performance by a factor of 2.2 for the model's standard configuration with 40 tracers at the strong scaling limit of 1 element per core.