Fault-Tolerant Consensus in Unknown and Anonymous Networks

TL;DR

This paper explores how to achieve reliable information sharing and consensus in unknown, anonymous networks with crash failures, introducing novel algorithms and a pseudo leader-election method to handle symmetry.

Contribution

It presents new algorithms for emulating registers and solving consensus in anonymous networks, using a pseudo leader-election approach that does not break symmetry.

Findings

Algorithms successfully emulate registers in anonymous networks.

Consensus can be achieved under various synchrony assumptions.

The pseudo leader-election approach enables leader-based consensus without symmetry breaking.

Abstract

This paper investigates under which conditions information can be reliably shared and consensus can be solved in unknown and anonymous message-passing networks that suffer from crash-failures. We provide algorithms to emulate registers and solve consensus under different synchrony assumptions. For this, we introduce a novel pseudo leader-election approach which allows a leader-based consensus implementation without breaking symmetry.