Related papers: Baxos: Backing off for Robust and Efficient Consen…
Paxos, the de facto standard approach to solving distributed consensus, operates in two phases, each of which requires an intersecting quorum of nodes. Multi-Paxos reduces this to one phase by electing a leader but this leader is also a…
This experience report presents the results of an extensive performance evaluation conducted using four open-source implementations of Paxos deployed in Amazon's EC2. Paxos is a fundamental algorithm for building fault-tolerant services, at…
Consensus algorithms are deployed in the wide area to achieve high availability for geographically replicated applications. Wide-area consensus is challenging due to two main reasons: (1) low throughput due to the high latency overhead of…
There is a resurgence of interest in Byzantine fault-tolerant (BFT) systems due to blockchains. However, leader-based BFT consensus protocols used by permissioned blockchains have limited scalability and robustness. To alleviate the leader…
Widely deployed consensus protocols in the cloud are often leader-based and optimized for low latency under synchronous network conditions. However, cloud networks can experience disruptions such as network partitions, high-loss links, and…
Binary exponential backoff (BEB) is a decades-old algorithm for coordinating access to a shared channel. In modern networks, BEB plays an important role in WiFi (IEEE 802.11) and other wireless communication standards. Despite this track…
We study resilient leader-follower consensus of multi-agent systems (MASs) in the presence of adversarial agents, where agents' communication is modeled by time-varying topologies. The objective is to develop distributed algorithms for the…
Distributed consensus is integral to modern distributed systems. The widely adopted Paxos algorithm uses two phases, each requiring majority agreement, to reliably reach consensus. In this paper, we demonstrate that Paxos, which lies at the…
Recent works have proposed new Byzantine consensus algorithms for blockchains based on epidemics, a design which enables highly scalable performance at a low cost. These methods however critically depend on a secure random peer sampling…
Distributed consensus algorithms such as Paxos have been studied extensively. They all use the same definition of safety. Liveness is especially important in practice despite well-known theoretical impossibility results. However, many…
Proof-of-Stake systems randomly choose, on each round, one of the participants as a consensus leader that extends the chain with the next block such that the selection probability is proportional to the owned stake. However, distributed…
Distributed consensus is a key enabler for many distributed systems including distributed databases and blockchains. Canopus is a scalable distributed consensus protocol that ensures that live nodes in a system agree on an ordered sequence…
Multi-BFT consensus runs multiple leader-based consensus instances in parallel, circumventing the leader bottleneck of a single instance. However, it contains an Achilles' heel: the need to globally order output blocks across instances.…
Distributed control systems require high reliability and availability guarantees despite often being deployed at the edge of network infrastructure. Edge computing resources are less secure and less reliable than centralized resources in…
Paxos and Fast Paxos are optimal consensus algorithms that are simple and elegant, while suitable for efficient implementation. In this paper, we compare the performance of both algorithms in failure-free and failure-prone runs using…
Classic BFT consensus protocols guarantee safety and liveness for all clients if fewer than one-third of replicas are faulty. However, in applications such as high-value payments, some clients may want to prioritize safety over liveness.…
Distributional shifts pose a significant challenge to achieving robustness in contemporary machine learning. To overcome this challenge, robust satisficing (RS) seeks a robust solution to an unspecified distributional shift while achieving…
Lamport's Paxos algorithm is a classic consensus protocol for state machine replication in environments that admit crash failures. Many versions of Paxos exploit the protocol's intrinsic properties for the sake of gaining better run-time…
We present an algorithm for synchronous deterministic Byzantine consensus, tolerant to links failures and links asynchrony. It cares for a class of networks with specific needs, where both safety and liveness are essential, and timely…
Blockchain has received great attention in recent years and motivated innovations in different scenarios. However, many vital issues which affect its performance are still open. For example, it is widely convinced that high level of…