Legible Consensus: Topology-Aware Quorum Geometry for Asymmetric Networks
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arXiv
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| Format: | Preprint |
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2026
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| _version_ | 1866917378266234880 |
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| author | Mason, Tony |
| author_facet | Mason, Tony |
| contents | Quorum design over asymmetric topologies conflates two independent concerns: inter-tier obligation (which tiers must participate for cross-tier safety) and intra-tier replication (how each tier survives local failures). Flat quorums treat all nodes as interchangeable; when consensus fails, the structure does not reveal whether a tier was unreachable or a tier lost too many replicas. We show that mapping a crumbling-wall quorum construction to a physically tiered network separates these concerns and makes the protocol's failure modes legible: an operator can determine which tiers retain global consensus capability from the wall structure and connectivity state alone, without runtime probing. Using a 10-node Earth/LEO/Moon/Mars topology as a magnifying glass, we confirm that three of four tiers retain global liveness during Mars conjunction blackout; only the disconnected tier loses it. Consensus latency at each tier equals the speed-of-light round-trip to Earth: 183~ms (Earth), 131~ms (LEO), 5.1~s (Moon). The wall also imposes a leadership cost gradient on Multi-Paxos elections that symmetric grid quorums cannot express. A comparison between sparse and full-coverage topologies separates wall obligations from network reachability as independent liveness constraints. All results are design-level; quorum intersection is verified exhaustively in TLA+. |
| format | Preprint |
| id |
arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2603_28788 |
| institution | arXiv |
| publishDate | 2026 |
| record_format | arxiv |
| spellingShingle | Legible Consensus: Topology-Aware Quorum Geometry for Asymmetric Networks Mason, Tony Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing Networking and Internet Architecture Quorum design over asymmetric topologies conflates two independent concerns: inter-tier obligation (which tiers must participate for cross-tier safety) and intra-tier replication (how each tier survives local failures). Flat quorums treat all nodes as interchangeable; when consensus fails, the structure does not reveal whether a tier was unreachable or a tier lost too many replicas. We show that mapping a crumbling-wall quorum construction to a physically tiered network separates these concerns and makes the protocol's failure modes legible: an operator can determine which tiers retain global consensus capability from the wall structure and connectivity state alone, without runtime probing. Using a 10-node Earth/LEO/Moon/Mars topology as a magnifying glass, we confirm that three of four tiers retain global liveness during Mars conjunction blackout; only the disconnected tier loses it. Consensus latency at each tier equals the speed-of-light round-trip to Earth: 183~ms (Earth), 131~ms (LEO), 5.1~s (Moon). The wall also imposes a leadership cost gradient on Multi-Paxos elections that symmetric grid quorums cannot express. A comparison between sparse and full-coverage topologies separates wall obligations from network reachability as independent liveness constraints. All results are design-level; quorum intersection is verified exhaustively in TLA+. |
| title | Legible Consensus: Topology-Aware Quorum Geometry for Asymmetric Networks |
| topic | Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing Networking and Internet Architecture |
| url | https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.28788 |