Synchronous consensus under hybrid process and link failures

We introduce a comprehensive hybrid failure model for synchronous distributed systems, which extends a conventional hybrid process failure model by adding communication failures: Every process in the system is allowed to commit up to fℓs send link failures and experience up to fℓr receive link failu...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Theoretical computer science 2011-09, Vol.412 (40), p.5602-5630
Main Authors: Biely, Martin, Schmid, Ulrich, Weiss, Bettina
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Algorithmics. Computability. Computer arithmetics
Algorithms
Applied sciences
Authentication
Byzantine agreement
Communication systems
Computer science
control theory
systems
Computer systems and distributed systems. User interface
Exact sciences and technology
Failure
Fault-tolerant distributed systems
Hybrid failure models
Link failures
Links
Lower bounds
Mathematical models
Messages
Miscellaneous
Software
Synchronous
Theoretical computing
Uniform consensus
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Summary:We introduce a comprehensive hybrid failure model for synchronous distributed systems, which extends a conventional hybrid process failure model by adding communication failures: Every process in the system is allowed to commit up to fℓs send link failures and experience up to fℓr receive link failures per round here, without being considered faulty; up to some fℓsa≤fℓs and fℓra≤fℓr among those may even cause erroneous messages rather than just omissions. In a companion paper (Schmid et al. (2009) [14]), devoted to a complete suite of related impossibility results and lower bounds, we proved that this model surpasses all existing link failure modeling approaches in terms of the assumption coverage in a simple probabilistic setting. In this paper, we show that several well-known synchronous consensus algorithms can be adapted to work under our failure model, provided that the number of processes required for tolerating process failures is increased by small integer multiples of fℓs, fℓr, fℓsa, fℓra. This is somewhat surprising, given that consensus in the presence of unrestricted link failures and mobile (moving) process omission failures is impossible. We provide detailed formulas for the required number of processes and rounds, which reveal that the lower bounds established in our companion paper are tight. We also explore the power and limitations of authentication in our setting, and consider uniform consensus algorithms, which guarantee their properties also for benign faulty processes.
ISSN:0304-3975
1879-2294
DOI:10.1016/j.tcs.2010.09.032