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.Dolev, D. and Strong, R. Polynomial Algorithms for Byzantine Agreement. Proc. 14th ACM Symp. on Theory of Computing (1982), 401-407. Google Scholar
Digital Library
- 2.Fischer, M. and Lynch, N. A Lower Bound for the Time to Assure Interactive Consistency. Information Processing Letters 14, 4 (1982), 182-186.Google Scholar
Cross Ref
- 3.Fischer, M., Lynch, N. and Paterson, M. Impossibility of Distributed Consensus With One Faulty Process. MIT/LCS/TR-282. Google Scholar
Digital Library
- 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.Google Scholar
Index Terms
Another advantage of free choice (Extended Abstract): Completely asynchronous agreement protocols




Comments