Chapter 5 Distributed Consensus with Link Failures
In this and the next two chapters, we study problems of reaching consensus in a distributed network. In such problems, each of the processes in the network begins with an initial value of a particular type and is supposed to eventually output a value of that same type. The outputs are required to be the same—the processes must agree—even though the inputs can be arbitrary. There is generally a validity condition describing the output values that are permitted for each pattern of inputs.
When there are no failures of system components, consensus problems are usually easy to solve, using a simple exchange of messages. To make matters more interesting, the problems are usually considered in settings ...
Become an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
and much more.
Read now
Unlock full access