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Reaching Agreement Among k out of n Processes

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Structural Information and Communication Complexity (SIROCCO 2024)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNCS,volume 14662))

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Abstract

In agreement problems, each process has an input value and must choose a decision (output) value. Given \(n\ge 2\) processes and \(m \ge 2\) possible different input values, we want to design an agreement algorithm that enables as many processes as possible to decide on the (same) input value of one of the processes in the presence of t crash failures. Without communication, when each process simply decides on its input value, at least \(\lceil (n-t)/m \rceil \) of the processes are guaranteed to always decide on the same value. Can we do better with communication? For some cases, for example, when \(m=2\), even in the presence of a single crash failure, the answer is negative in a deterministic asynchronous system where communication is either by using atomic read/write registers or by sending and receiving messages. The answer is positive in other cases.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    There are no synchrony assumptions whatsoever. A process that finishes phase one, immediately starts participating in phase two.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Reichman University, 46150, Herzliya, Israel

    Gadi Taubenfeld

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  1. Gadi Taubenfeld
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Correspondence to Gadi Taubenfeld .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Faculty of Data and Decision Sciences, Technion – Israel Institute of Technolog, Haifa, Israel

    Yuval Emek

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Taubenfeld, G. (2024). Reaching Agreement Among k out of n Processes. In: Emek, Y. (eds) Structural Information and Communication Complexity. SIROCCO 2024. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 14662. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-60603-8_24

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-60603-8_24

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-031-60602-1

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-031-60603-8

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