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Consensus with Partial Synchrony

1988; Dwork, Lynch, Stockmeyer

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Encyclopedia of Algorithms

Keywords and Synonyms

Agreement problem        

Problem Definition

Reaching agreement is one of the central issues in fault tolerant distributed computing. One version of this problem, called Consensus, is defined over a fixed set \( \Pi=\{p_1, \dots,p_n\} \) of n processes that communicate by exchanging messages along channels. Messages are correctly transmitted (no duplication, no corruption), but some of them may be lost. Processes may fail by prematurely stopping (crash), may omit to send or receive some messages (omission), or may compute erroneous values (Byzantine faults). Such processes are said to be faulty. Every process \( { p \in \Pi } \) has an initial value v p and non-faulty processes must decide irrevocably on a common value v. Moreover, if the initial values are all equal to the same value v, then the common decision value is v. The properties that define Consensus can be split into safety properties (processes decide on the same value; the decision value must be consistent...

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Intuitively, “known bound” means that the bound can be “built into” the algorithm. A formal definition is given in the next section.

Recommended Reading

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  5. Dolev, D., Dwork, C., Stockmeyer, L.: On the minimal synchrony needed for distributed consensus. J. ACM 34(1), 77–97 (1987)

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Laboratory for Informatics, The Polytechnic School, Palaiseau, France

    Bernadette Charron-Bost

  2. EPFL, Lausanne, Switzerland

    André Schiper

Authors
  1. Bernadette Charron-Bost
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  2. André Schiper
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer ScienceMcCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science, Northwestern University, Evanston, IL, 60208, USA

    Ming-Yang Kao Professor of Computer Science

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© 2008 Springer-Verlag

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Charron-Bost, B., Schiper, A. (2008). Consensus with Partial Synchrony. In: Kao, MY. (eds) Encyclopedia of Algorithms. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-30162-4_91

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