Near-optimal communication-time tradeoff in fault-tolerant computation of aggregate functions

This paper considers the problem of computing general commutative and associative aggregate functions (such as SUM) over distributed inputs held by nodes in a distributed system, while tolerating failures. Specifically, there are N nodes in the system, and the topology among them is modeled as a general undirected graph. Whenever a node sends a message, the message is received by all of its neighbors in the graph. Each node has an input, and the goal is for a special root node (e.g., the base station in wireless sensor networks or the gateway node in wireless ad hoc networks) to learn a certain commutative and associate aggregate of all these inputs. All nodes in the system except the root node may experience crash failures, with the total number of edges incidental to failed nodes being upper bounded by f. The timing model is synchronous where protocols proceed in rounds. Within such a context, we focus on the following question: Under any given constraint on time complexity, what i...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2016
• Where: DC
• Authors: Yuda Zhao, Haifeng Yu, Binbin Chen
• Keywords: DC 2016, Internet Technology