Related papers: Revisiting Lower Bounds for Two-Step Consensus
Population protocols are a formal model of sensor networks consisting of identical mobile devices. Two devices can interact and thereby change their states. Computations are infinite sequences of interactions in which the interacting…
In the online packet buffering problem (also known as the unweighted FIFO variant of buffer management), we focus on a single network packet switching device with several input ports and one output port. This device forwards unit-size,…
We provide a game-theoretic analysis of consensus, assuming that processes are controlled by rational agents and may fail by crashing. We consider agents that \emph{care only about consensus}: that is, (a) an agent's utility depends only on…
We consider the problem of solving consensus using deterministic algorithms in a synchronous dynamic network with unreliable, directional point-to-point links, which are under the control of a message adversary. In contrast to a large body…
It is commonly held that asynchronous consensus is much more complex, difficult, and costly than partially-synchronous algorithms, especially without using common coins. This paper challenges that conventional wisdom with que sera consensus…
Today's practical partially synchronous Byzantine Fault Tolerant (BFT) consensus protocols trade off low latency and high throughput. On the one end, traditional BFT protocols such as PBFT and its derivatives optimize for latency. They…
Fingerprinting enables two parties to infer whether the messages they hold are the same or different when the cost of communication is high: each message is associated with a smaller fingerprint and comparisons between messages are made in…
Each application developer desires to provide its users with consistent results and an always-available system despite failures. Boldly, the CALM theorem disagrees. It states that it is hard to design a system that is both consistent and…
Consensus of autonomous agents is a benchmark problem in multi-agent control. In this paper, we consider continuous-time averaging consensus policies (or Laplacian flows) and their discrete-time counterparts over time-varying graphs in…
Protocols for tossing a common coin play a key role in the vast majority of implementations of consensus. Even though the common coins in the literature are usually \emph{fair} (they have equal chance of landing heads or tails), we focus on…
Byzantine agreement algorithms typically assume implicit initial state consistency and synchronization among the correct nodes and then operate in coordinated rounds of information exchange to reach agreement based on the input values. The…
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…
Consensus conditions and convergence speeds are crucial for distributed consensus algorithms of networked systems. Based on a basic first-order average-consensus protocol with time-varying topologies and additive noises, this paper first…
In this paper, we give a deterministic two-step Byzantine consensus protocol that achieves safety and liveness. A two-step Byzantine consensus protocol only needs two communication steps to commit in the absence of faults. Most two-step…
Byzantine agreement (BA) is a distributed consensus problem where $n$ processors want to reach agreement on an $\ell$-bit message or value, but up to $t$ of the processors are dishonest or faulty. The challenge of this BA problem lies in…
Existing protocols for multilateral negotiation require a full consensus among the negotiating parties. In contrast, we propose a protocol for multilateral negotiation that allows partial consensus, wherein only a subset of the negotiating…
We study the problems of asymptotic and approximate consensus in which agents have to get their values arbitrarily close to each others' inside the convex hull of initial values, either without or with an explicit decision by the agents. In…
The optimal space complexity of consensus in shared memory is a decades-old open problem. For a system of $n$ processes, no algorithm is known that uses a sublinear number of registers. However, the best known lower bound due to Fich,…
The Byzantine agreement problem requires a set of $n$ processes to agree on a value sent by a transmitter, despite a subset of $b$ processes behaving in an arbitrary, i.e. Byzantine, manner and sending corrupted messages to all processes in…
Hotspots, a small set of tuples frequently read/written by a large number of transactions, cause contention in a concurrency control protocol. While a hotspot may comprise only a small fraction of a transaction's execution time,…