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Necessary and sufficient conditions for broadcast consensus protocols

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Summary

We consider consensus protocols in asynchronous distributed systems that are based on broadcast communication. We show that a necessary and sufficient condition for the existence of a deterministic consensus protocol is delivery of each broadcast message to at least ⌈(n+k+1)/2⌊ processes in ann-process system subject tok crash failures with either eventual fair broadcasting or eventual full broadcasting. The broadcast model captures the idea of a broadcast communication medium, such as the Ethernet, in which messages, if delivered, are delivered immediately and in order but not necessarily to all processes.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering University of California, 93106, Santa Barbara, CA, USA

    Louise E. Moser, P. M. Melliar-Smith & Vivek Agrawala

Authors
  1. Louise E. Moser
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  2. P. M. Melliar-Smith
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  3. Vivek Agrawala
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Additional information

Louise E. Moser received the Ph.D. degree in mathematics from the University of Wisconsin, Madison, in 1970. From 1970 to 1987 she was a professor of mathematics and computer science at California State University, Hayward. In 1987 she moved to the University of California, Santa Barbara, where is currently on the faculty of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. Her current research interests include parallel and distributed systems, network architectures and communication protocols, and formal methods in software engineering.

P.M. Melliar-Smith received the Ph.D. degree in computer science from the University of Cambridge, Cambridge, England, in 1987. He was a senior research scientist and program director at SRI International in Menlo Park (1976–1987), senior research associate at the University of Newcastle Upon Tyne (1973–1976), and principal designer for GEC Computers Ltd. in England (1964–1973). He is currently a professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of California, Santa Barbara. His research interests include fault-tolerant distributed systems, high-speed communication networks and protocols, and formal specification and verification.

Vivek Agrawala received the B.Tech. degree in chemical engineering in 1984 and the M. Tech. degree in computer technology in 1986, both from the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi, and a Ph.D. in computer science in 1991 from the University of California, Santa Barbara. Since then he has been a Research Scientist at Siemens Corporate Research, Princeton, New Jersey. His major research interests are distributed algorithms, software design methods, and distributed systems.

This research was supported by the National Science Foundation, Grant Numbers CCR-8908515 and NCR-9016361. V. Agrawala's current address is Siemens Corporate Research, 755 College Road East, Princeton, NJ 08540, USA

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Moser, L.E., Melliar-Smith, P.M. & Agrawala, V. Necessary and sufficient conditions for broadcast consensus protocols. Distrib Comput 7, 75–85 (1993). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02280837

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