| TR#: | CS0492 |
| Class: | CS |
| Title: | Impossibility Results in the Presence of Multiple Faulty Processes |
| Authors: | G. Taubenfeld, S. Katz and S. Moran |
| CS0492.pdf | |
| Abstract: | We investigate the impossibility of solving certain problems in an unreliable distributed system where multiple processes may fail. A necessary condition is provided for the solvability of problems in the presence of multiple faulty processes, and variants of problems which are unsolvable in the presence of a single faulty process (such as consensus, choosing a leader, ranking, matching) are shown to be solvable in the presence of t-1 faulty processes but not in the presence of t faulty processes for any t. In order to prove the impossibility result we use a novel technique: a contradiction is shown among a set of axioms which characterize any fault-tolerant protocol solving the problems we treat. These results generalize previously known impossibility results for completely asynchronous systems. |
| Copyright | The above paper is copyright by the Technion, Author(s), or others. Please contact the author(s) for more information |
Remark: Any link to this technical report should be to this page (http://www.cs.technion.ac.il/users/wwwb/cgi-bin/tr-info.cgi/1988/CS/CS0492), rather than to the URL of the PDF files directly. The latter URLs may change without notice.
To the list of the CS technical reports of 1988
To the main CS technical reports page