It is shown that, in a precise sense, if there is no bound on the number of faulty processes in a system with unreliable but fair communication, Uniform Distributed Coordination (UDC) can be attained if and only if a system has perfect failure detectors. This result is generalized to the case where there is a bound t on the number of faulty processes. It is shown that a certain type of generalized failure detector is necessary and sufficient for achieving UDC in a context with at most t faulty processes. Reasoning about processes' knowledge as to which other processes are faulty plays a key role in the analysis.
@article{arxiv.cs/0402012,
title = {A Knowledge-Theoretic Analysis of Uniform Distributed Coordination and Failure Detectors},
author = {Joseph Y. Halpern and Aleta Ricciardi},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:cs/0402012},
year = {2007}
}
Comments
A preliminary version of this paper appeared in the 18th ACM Symposium on Principles of Distributed Computing, 1999, pp. 73-82. This version will appear in Distributed Computing