Circumventing the FLP Impossibility Result with Open Atomic Ethernet

TL;DR

This paper introduces Open Atomic Ethernet, a bisynchronous system that bypasses the FLP impossibility by rejecting asynchrony, enabling deterministic consensus in distributed networks.

Contribution

It presents a novel bisynchronous model and a Layer 2 protocol that achieve atomic coordination without relying on traditional asynchronous assumptions.

Findings

Achieves deterministic atomic coordination in a bisynchronous setting.

Circumvents FLP impossibility by rejecting asynchrony at the system's foundation.

Introduces the concept of bisynchronous to describe the new model.

Abstract

The Fischer--Lynch--Paterson (FLP) impossibility result is widely regarded as one of the most fundamental negative results in distributed computing: no deterministic protocol can guarantee consensus in an asynchronous system with even one faulty process. For forty years, the field has treated this as an immovable constraint, designing around it with randomized protocols, failure detectors, and weakened consistency models. This essay argues that FLP is not a law of physics but a theorem about a particular system model -- and that Open Atomic Ethernet (OAE) circumvents it by rejecting the asynchronous model at its foundation. We introduce the term bisynchronous to describe OAE's key property: bounded-time bilateral resolution in which both parties reach common knowledge of outcome at every round boundary -- a strictly stronger guarantee than synchrony alone. By constructing a bisynchronous, swap-based protocol at Layer 2, OAE sidesteps the load-bearing assumptions of FLP's asynchronous model, achieving deterministic atomic coordination without violating any impossibility result.