Solving the Problem of Consensus with Unknown Participants Regardless of Process Crashes

Consensus is a fundamental building block for solving important fault-tolerant distributed problems that require agreement among a set of processes. However, for self-organized networks with highly decentralized and self-organized natures, neither the identity nor number of processes is known to all participants at the beginning of the computation, even at the end. Hence, consensus on such networks cannot be achieved in the same manner for traditional fixed networks. To address this problem of Consensus with Unknown Participants (CUP), a variant of the traditional consensus problem was first proposed, by relaxing the requirement that every process needs to know all participants involved in the computation initially. Later, the CUP problem was extended to consider process crashes. This new problem is called Fault-Tolerant Consensus with Unknown Participants (FT-CUP). Recently, one sufficient knowledge connectivity condition based on which the FT-CUP problem can be solved with a minimal synchrony assumption was proposed in the literature. In this paper, we continue to investigate such a problem. In particular, we provide a less constrained condition, which is still sufficient for solving the FTCUP problem, and also present a consensus algorithm based on such a condition to demonstrate the core concept as well as some properties of such a condition.

並列關鍵字

self-organized networks ； consensus ； asynchronous systems ； unknown participants ； minimal synchrony

國際替代計量

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