Experimental Comparison of Local and Shared Coin Randomized Consensus Protocols

The paper presents a comparative performance study of the two main classes of randomized binary consensus protocols: a local coin protocol, with an expected high communication complexity and cheap symmetric cryptography, and a shared coin protocol, with an expected low communication complexity and expensive asymmetric cryptography. The experimental evaluation was conducted on a LAN environment, by varying several system parameters, such as the fault types and number of processes. The analysis shows that there is a significant gap between the theoretical and the practical performance results of these protocols, and provides an important insight into what actually happens during their execution.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2006
• Where: SRDS
• Authors: Henrique Moniz, Nuno Ferreira Neves, Miguel Correia, Paulo Veríssimo
• Keywords: Coin Protocol, Communication Complexity, Expected Low Communication, SRDS 2006