Brief Announcement: Failure Detectors Encapsulate Fairness

Abstract. We argue that failure detectors encapsulate fairness. Fairness is a measure of the number of steps a process takes relative to another processes and/or messages in transit. As evidence we specify fairness-based message-passing system models that are the weakest to implement the failure detectors from [1]. Failure Detectors and Partial Synchrony. Failure detectors [1], system services that provide potentially unreliable information about process crashes in an otherwise asynchronous system, are believed to encapsulate partial synchrony [3]. That is, given a partially synchronous system model M, it is possible to replace M with an asynchronous system augmented with an appropriate failure detector D (that is implementable in M) such that all the problems solvable in M are also solvable in the asynchronous system augmented with D. Hence, the pursuit to find the ‘weakest’ system models to implement various failure detectors. Such pursuits have met with limited success, in part...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2010
• Where: WDAG
• Authors: Scott M. Pike, Srikanth Sastry, Jennifer L. Welch
• Keywords: Algorithms, Asynchronous System, Failure Detector, Failure Detector Classes, WDAG 2010