Topological Characterization of Consensus in Distributed Systems

Fuente: arXiv
Salvato in:
Dettagli Bibliografici
Autori principali: Nowak, Thomas, Schmid, Ulrich, Winkler, Kyrill
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2019
Soggetti:
Accesso online:
Tags: Aggiungi Tag
Nessun Tag, puoi essere il primo ad aggiungerne!!
_version_ 1866910571443519488
author Nowak, Thomas
Schmid, Ulrich
Winkler, Kyrill
author_facet Nowak, Thomas
Schmid, Ulrich
Winkler, Kyrill
contents We provide a complete characterization of both uniform and non-uniform deterministic consensus solvability in distributed systems with benign process and communication faults using point-set topology. More specifically, we non-trivially extend the approach introduced by Alpern and Schneider in 1985, by introducing novel fault-aware topologies on the space of infinite executions: the process-view topology, induced by a distance function that relies on the local view of a given process in an execution, and the minimum topology, which is induced by a distance function that focuses on the local view of the process that is the last to distinguish two executions. Consensus is solvable in a given model if and only if the sets of admissible executions leading to different decision values is disconnected in these topologies. By applying our approach to a wide range of different applications, we provide a topological explanation of a number of existing algorithms and impossibility results and develop several new ones, including a general equivalence of the strong and weak validity conditions.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_1905_09590
institution arXiv
publishDate 2019
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Topological Characterization of Consensus in Distributed Systems
Nowak, Thomas
Schmid, Ulrich
Winkler, Kyrill
Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing
We provide a complete characterization of both uniform and non-uniform deterministic consensus solvability in distributed systems with benign process and communication faults using point-set topology. More specifically, we non-trivially extend the approach introduced by Alpern and Schneider in 1985, by introducing novel fault-aware topologies on the space of infinite executions: the process-view topology, induced by a distance function that relies on the local view of a given process in an execution, and the minimum topology, which is induced by a distance function that focuses on the local view of the process that is the last to distinguish two executions. Consensus is solvable in a given model if and only if the sets of admissible executions leading to different decision values is disconnected in these topologies. By applying our approach to a wide range of different applications, we provide a topological explanation of a number of existing algorithms and impossibility results and develop several new ones, including a general equivalence of the strong and weak validity conditions.
title Topological Characterization of Consensus in Distributed Systems
topic Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing
url https://arxiv.org/abs/1905.09590