The Chinese Generals Problem

Abstract—To achieve higher reliability, safety, and faulttolerance, many mission-critical detection and decision systems implement consensus algorithms that force the systems’ underlying sensor networks to reach the states of consensus and unanimous decision among the sensor nodes. Most consensus algorithms presented in the literature utilize local averaging (for continuous values) and majority voting (for discrete values) operators combined with iterative message passing and other similar nearest-neighbor information propagation schemes. Although very simple to implement, such schemes can be very prone to noise because individual detection and decision errors can be amplified and propagated many times throughout the network. For this reason, in this paper we propose a novel consensus algorithm for binary systems that requires each sensor node to participate in message propagation only if its input exceeds a predetermined threshold. This algorithm is a solution to what we call The...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2008
• Where: CISS
• Authors: Edwin Soedarmadji
• Keywords: CISS 2008, Consensus Algorithm, Implement Consensus Algorithms, Information Management, Sensor Node