Another advantage of free choice (Extended Abstract): Completely asynchronous agreement protocols

ABSTRACT

Recently, Fischer, Lynch and Paterson [3] proved that no completely asynchronous consensus protocol can tolerate even a single unannounced process death. We exhibit here a probabilistic solution for this problem, which guarantees that as long as a majority of the processes continues to operate, a decision will be made (Theorem 1). Our solution is completely asynchronous and is rather strong: As in [4], it is guaranteed to work with probability 1 even against an adversary scheduler who knows all about the system.

References

1. 1.Dolev, D. and Strong, R. Polynomial Algorithms for Byzantine Agreement. Proc. 14th ACM Symp. on Theory of Computing (1982), 401-407.
2. 2.Fischer, M. and Lynch, N. A Lower Bound for the Time to Assure Interactive Consistency. Information Processing Letters 14, 4 (1982), 182-186.
3. 3.Fischer, M., Lynch, N. and Paterson, M. Impossibility of Distributed Consensus With One Faulty Process. MIT/LCS/TR-282.
4. 4.Lehman, D. and Rabin, M. On the Advantages of Free Choice: A Symmetric and Fully Distributed Solution to the Dining Philosophers Problem. to appear.

Index Terms

• Mathematics of computing

  • Mathematical analysis

    • Numerical analysis

      • Computations on polynomials

• Theory of computation

  • Models of computation

    • Probabilistic computation