A communication-efficient canonical form for fault-tolerant distributed protocols
PODC '86 Proceedings of the fifth annual ACM symposium on Principles of distributed computing
Tight bounds for the sequence transmission problem
Proceedings of the eighth annual ACM Symposium on Principles of distributed computing
Knowledge and common knowledge in a distributed environment
Journal of the ACM (JACM)
Reasoning about knowledge
A note on reliable full-duplex transmission over half-duplex links
Communications of the ACM
The Need for Headers: An Impossibility Result for Communication over Unreliable Channels
CONCUR '90 Proceedings of the Theories of Concurrency: Unification and Extension
Causing communication closure: safe program composition with Non-FIFO channels
DISC'05 Proceedings of the 19th international conference on Distributed Computing
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Ideal communication channels in asynchronous systems are reliable, deliver messages in FIFO order, and do not deliver spurious or duplicate messages. A message vocabulary of size two (i.e., single-bit messages) suffices to encode and transmit messages of arbitrary finite length over such channels. This note proves that single-bit messages are insufficient once channels potentially deliver duplicate messages. In particular, it is shown that no protocol allows the sender to notify the receiver which of three values it holds, over a bidirectional, reliable, FIFO channel that may duplicate messages. This implies that messages must encode some additional control information, e.g., in the form of headers or tags.