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Recent Results on Fault-Tolerant Consensus in Message-Passing Networks

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Structural Information and Communication Complexity (SIROCCO 2016)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNTCS,volume 9988))

Abstract

Fault-tolerant consensus has been studied extensively in the literature, because it is one of the important distributed primitives and has wide applications in practice. This paper surveys important works on fault-tolerant consensus in message-passing networks, and the focus is on results from the past decade. Particularly, we categorize the results into two groups: new problem formulations and practical applications. In the first part, we discuss new ways to define the consensus problem, which include larger input domains, enriched correctness properties, different network models, etc. In the second part, we focus on real-world systems that use Paxos or Raft to reach consensus, and Byzantine Fault-Tolerant (BFT) systems. We also discuss Bitcoin, which can be related to solving Byzantine consensus in anonymous systems, and compare Bitcoin with BFT systems and Byzantine consensus algorithms.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Note that there are also other definitions of partial synchrony. We choose to present this particular definition, since many BFT systems only satisfy liveness under this particular definition. Please refer to [12, 31] for more models on partial synchrony.

  2. 2.

    We would like to thank the anonymous reviewer who pointed out that Windows Azure also uses ZooKeepr to manage virtual machines [1].

  3. 3.

    Here, we follow the convention: (i) Bitcoin network includes all the anonymous participants in the Bitcoin system and the network that supports the anonymous communication; and (ii) throughout the discussion, “Bitcoin” refers to the system/network, whereas, “bitcoin” refers to the basic unit of the cryptocurrency.

  4. 4.

    One technical issue here is that the Blockchain has the “eventually consistent” feature. The exact mechanism to handle the issue is beyond the scope of this survey. Please refer to a nice textbook [61] for some mechanisms.

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Acknowledgment

We would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for encouragement and suggestions. We also acknowledge Nitin H. Vaidya for early feedback and Michel Raynal for pointers to several new works.

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  1. Coordinated Science Laboratory, Department of Computer Science, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, USA

    Lewis Tseng

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  1. Aalto University, Espoo, Finland

    Jukka Suomela

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Tseng, L. (2016). Recent Results on Fault-Tolerant Consensus in Message-Passing Networks. In: Suomela, J. (eds) Structural Information and Communication Complexity. SIROCCO 2016. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 9988. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-48314-6_7

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