
TL;DR
This paper explores how silence can be used as a communication mechanism in distributed systems to reduce message costs, introducing formal conditions, identifying key patterns like silent choir, and designing a new efficient atomic commitment protocol.
Contribution
It formalizes conditions for information transfer via silence, identifies the silent choir pattern, and develops a message-optimal atomic commitment protocol using silence with improved round complexity.
Findings
Silent choir pattern is central to silence-based communication.
New atomic commitment protocol decides in 3 rounds in the common case.
Achieves lower message complexity compared to previous protocols.
Abstract
The cost of communication is a substantial factor affecting the scalability of many distributed applications. Every message sent can incur a cost in storage, computation, energy and bandwidth. Consequently, reducing the communication costs of distributed applications is highly desirable. The best way to reduce message costs is by communicating without sending any messages whatsoever. This paper initiates a rigorous investigation into the use of silence in synchronous settings, in which processes can fail. We formalize sufficient conditions for information transfer using silence, as well as necessary conditions for particular cases of interest. This allows us to identify message patterns that enable communication through silence. In particular, a pattern called a {\em silent choir} is identified, and shown to be central to information transfer via silence in failure-prone systems. The…
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Taxonomy
TopicsDistributed systems and fault tolerance · Complexity and Algorithms in Graphs · Interconnection Networks and Systems
