Impossibility Results and Lower Bounds for Consensus under Link Failures

Ulrich Schmid, Bettina Weiss, Idit Keidar
2009 SIAM journal on computing (Print)  
We provide a suite of impossibility results and lower bounds for the required number of processes and rounds for synchronous consensus under transient link failures. Our results show that consensus can be solved even in presence of O(n 2 ) moving omission and/or arbitrary link failures per round, provided that both the number of affected outgoing and incoming links of every process is bounded. Providing a step further towards the weakest conditions under which consensus is solvable, our
more » ... are applicable to a variety of dynamic phenomena such as transient communication failures and end-to-end delay variations. We also prove that our model surpasses alternative link failure modeling approaches in terms of assumption coverage.
doi:10.1137/s009753970443999x fatcat:h7adimj3r5amhkp33irl4xegcu