A Knowledge-Theoretic Analysis of Uniform Distributed Coordination and Failure Detectors

Joseph Y. Halpern; Aleta Ricciardi

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arXiv · cs/0402012

A Knowledge-Theoretic Analysis of Uniform Distributed Coordination and Failure Detectors

Joseph Y. Halpern·Aleta Ricciardi

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Abstract

It is shown that, in a precise sense, if there is no bound on the number of faulty processes in a system with unreliable but fair communication, Uniform Distributed Coordination (UDC) can be attained if and only if a system has perfect failure detectors. This result is generalized to the case where there is a bound t on the number of faulty processes. It is shown that a certain type of generalized failure detector is necessary and sufficient for achieving UDC in a context with at most t faulty processes. Reasoning about processes' knowledge as to which other processes are faulty plays a key role in the analysis.

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BibTeX RIS

Joseph Y. Halpern, Aleta Ricciardi. 2004-02-05. A Knowledge-Theoretic Analysis of Uniform Distributed Coordination and Failure Detectors. https://arxiv.org/abs/cs/0402012

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