Self-Stabilizing Pulse Synchronization Inspired by Biological Pacemaker Networks

TL;DR

This paper introduces a biologically inspired, self-stabilizing pulse synchronization algorithm for distributed systems that tolerates Byzantine faults, achieving near-optimal synchronization tightness without relying on synchronized pulses.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel Byzantine pulse synchronization algorithm inspired by biological pacemaker networks, achieving high fault tolerance and stability.

Findings

Achieves near-optimal synchronization tightness.

Tolerates up to one-third Byzantine nodes.

Enables stabilization of general Byzantine algorithms.

Abstract

We define the ``Pulse Synchronization'' problem that requires nodes to achieve tight synchronization of regular pulse events, in the settings of distributed computing systems. Pulse-coupled synchronization is a phenomenon displayed by a large variety of biological systems, typically overcoming a high level of noise. Inspired by such biological models, a robust and self-stabilizing Byzantine pulse synchronization algorithm for distributed computer systems is presented. The algorithm attains near optimal synchronization tightness while tolerating up to a third of the nodes exhibiting Byzantine behavior concurrently. Pulse synchronization has been previously shown to be a powerful building block for designing algorithms in this severe fault model. We have previously shown how to stabilize general Byzantine algorithms, using pulse synchronization. To the best of our knowledge there is no other scheme to do this without the use of synchronized pulses.