Knowledge and common knowledge in a distributed environment
Journal of the ACM (JACM)
Early stopping in Byzantine agreement
Journal of the ACM (JACM)
Knowledge and common knowledge in a byzantine environment: crash failures
Information and Computation
Impossibility of distributed consensus with one faulty process
Journal of the ACM (JACM)
Reaching Agreement in the Presence of Faults
Journal of the ACM (JACM)
A Layered Analysis of Consensus
SIAM Journal on Computing
Consensus in Synchronous Systems: A Concise Guided Tour
PRDC '02 Proceedings of the 2002 Pacific Rim International Symposium on Dependable Computing
Conditions on input vectors for consensus solvability in asynchronous distributed systems
Journal of the ACM (JACM)
Reasoning About Knowledge
Asynchronous Agreement and Its Relation with Error-Correcting Codes
IEEE Transactions on Computers
Transforming worst-case optimal solutions for simultaneous tasks into all-case optimal solutions
Proceedings of the 30th annual ACM SIGACT-SIGOPS symposium on Principles of distributed computing
No double discount: Condition-based simultaneity yields limited gain
Information and Computation
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Assuming that each process proposes a value, the consensusproblem requires the non-faulty processes to agree on the same value that, moreover, must be one of the proposed values. Solutions to the consensus problem in synchronous systems are based on the round-based model, namely, the processes progress in synchronous rounds. The well-known worst-case lower bound for consensus in the synchronous setting is t+ 1 rounds, where tis an a prioribound on the number of failures. Simultaneous consensusis a variant of consensus in which the non-faulty processes are required to decide in the exact same round, in addition to the deciding on the same value. Dwork and Moses showed that, in a synchronous system prone to tprocess crashes, the earliest round at which a common decision can be simultaneously obtained is (t+ 1) 茂戮驴 Wwhere tis a bound on the number of faulty processes and Wis a non-negative integer determined by the actual failure pattern F. In the condition-basedapproach consensus the consensus requirement is relaxed by assuming that the input vectors (consisting of the proposed initial values) are restricted to belong to a predetermined set C. Initially considered as a means to achieve solvability for consensus in the asynchronous setting, condition-based consensus was shown by Mostéfaoui, Rajsbaum and Raynal to allow solutions with better worst-case behavior. They defined a hierarchy of sets of conditions (where the set contains the condition made up of all possible input vectors). It has been shown that t+ 1 茂戮驴 dis a tight lower bound on the minimal number of rounds for synchronous condition-based consensus with a condition in .This paper considers condition-based simultaneous consensus in the synchronous model. It first presents a simple algorithm in which processes decide simultaneously at the end of the round RSt,d,F= (t+ 1) 茂戮驴 max (W, d). The paper then shows that RSt,d,Fis a lower bound for simultaneous condition-based consensus. A consequence of the analysis is that the algorithm presented is optimal in each and every run, and not just in the worst case: For every choice of failure pattern by the adversary (and every input configuration), the algorithm reaches simultaneous agreement as fast as any correct algorithm could do under the same conditions. This shows that, contrary to what could be hoped, when considering condition-based consensus with simultaneous decision, we can benefit from the best of both actual worlds (either the failure world when RSt,d,F= (t+ 1) 茂戮驴 W, or the condition world when RSt,d,F= d+ 1), but we cannot benefit from the sum of savings offered by both. Only the best discount applies.