Anonymous Asynchronous Systems: The Case of Failure Detectors

Abstract: Due the multiplicity of loci of control, a main issue distributed systems have to cope with lies in the uncertainty on the system state created by the adversaries that are asynchrony, failures, dynamicity, mobility, etc. Considering message-passing systems, this paper considers the uncertainty created by the net effect of three of these adversaries, namely, asynchrony, failures, and anonymity. This means that, in addition to be asynchronous and crash-prone, the processes have no identity. Trivially, agreement problems (e.g., consensus) that cannot be solved in presence of asynchrony and failures cannot be solved either when adding anonymity. The paper consequently proposes anonymous failure detectors to circumvent these impossibilities. It has several contributions. First it presents three classes of failure detectors (denoted AP, AΩ and AΣ) and show that they are the anonymous counterparts of the classes of perfect failure detectors, eventual leader failure detectors and...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2010
• Where: WDAG
• Authors: François Bonnet, Michel Raynal
• Keywords: Algorithms, Anonymous Failure Detector, Failure Detector, Failure Detector Class, WDAG 2010