The Adversarial Noise Threshold for Distributed Protocols

TL;DR

This paper establishes the maximum adversarial noise thresholds for distributed protocols over various network topologies, providing robust simulation methods that are near-optimal in error tolerance and efficiency.

Contribution

It introduces new compiler techniques for resilient distributed protocols that tolerate near-optimal adversarial error rates with efficient round complexity.

Findings

Robust simulation on sparse networks tolerates an error rate of Ω(1/n).

Maximum tolerable error rate on directed networks is Θ(1/s).

Per-edge error rate limits are characterized with near-optimal construction.

Abstract

We consider the problem of implementing distributed protocols, despite adversarial channel errors, on synchronous-messaging networks with arbitrary topology. In our first result we show that any $n$-party $T$-round protocol on an undirected communication network $G$ can be compiled into a robust simulation protocol on a sparse ($\mathcal{O}(n)$ edges) subnetwork so that the simulation tolerates an adversarial error rate of $\Omega\left(\frac{1}{n}\right)$; the simulation has a round complexity of $\mathcal{O}\left(\frac{m \log n}{n} T\right)$, where $m$ is the number of edges in $G$. (So the simulation is work-preserving up to a $\log$ factor.) The adversary's error rate is within a constant factor of optimal. Given the error rate, the round complexity blowup is within a factor of $\mathcal{O}(k \log n)$ of optimal, where $k$ is the edge connectivity of $G$. We also determine that the maximum tolerable error rate on directed communication networks is $\Theta(1/s)$ where $s$ is the number of edges in a minimum equivalent digraph. Next we investigate adversarial per-edge error rates, where the adversary is given an error budget on each edge of the network. We determine the exact limit for tolerable per-edge error rates on an arbitrary directed graph. However, the construction that approaches this limit has exponential round complexity, so we give another compiler, which transforms $T$-round protocols into $\mathcal{O}(mT)$-round simulations, and prove that for polynomial-query black box compilers, the per-edge error rate tolerated by this last compiler is within a constant factor of optimal.