OCD: Obsessive consensus disorder (or repetitive consensus)

Danny Dolev*, Ezra N. Hoch

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

5 Scopus citations

Abstract

Consider a distributed system S of sensors, where the goal is to continuously output an agreed reading. The input readings of non-faulty sensors may change over time; and some of the sensors may be faulty (Byzantine). Thus, the system is required to repeatedly perform consensus on the input values. This paper investigates the following question: assuming the input values of all the non-faulty sensors remain unchanged for a long period of time, what can be said about the agreed-upon output reading of the entire system? We prove that no system's output is stable, i.e. the faulty sensors can force a change of the output value at least once. We show that any system with binary input values can avoid changing its output more than once, thus matching the lower bound. For systems with multi-value inputs, we show that the output may change at most twice; when n = 3f +1 this solution is shown to be tight. Moreover, the solutions we present are self-stabilizing.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationPODC'08
Subtitle of host publicationProceedings of the 27th Annual ACM Symposium on Principles of Distributed Computing
Pages395-404
Number of pages10
StatePublished - 2008
Event27th ACM SIGACT-SIGOPS Symposium on Principles of Distributed Computing - Toronto, ON, Canada
Duration: 18 Aug 200821 Aug 2008

Publication series

NameProceedings of the Annual ACM Symposium on Principles of Distributed Computing

Conference

Conference27th ACM SIGACT-SIGOPS Symposium on Principles of Distributed Computing
Country/TerritoryCanada
CityToronto, ON
Period18/08/0821/08/08

Keywords

  • Byzantine failures
  • Distributed computing
  • Fault tolerance
  • Long-lived consensus
  • Repetitive consensus
  • Self-stabilization

Fingerprint

Dive into the research topics of 'OCD: Obsessive consensus disorder (or repetitive consensus)'. Together they form a unique fingerprint.

Cite this