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Lower bound on the step complexity of anonymous binary consensus

Hagit Attiya, Ohad Ben-Baruch, Danny Hendler

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

Abstract

Obstruction-free consensus, ensuring that a process running solo will eventually terminate, is at the core of practical ways to solve consensus, e.g., by using randomization or failure detectors. An obstructionfree consensus algorithm may not terminate in many executions, but it must terminate whenever a process runs solo. Such an algorithm can be evaluated by its solo step complexity, which bounds the worst case number of steps taken by a process running alone, from any configuration, until it decides. This paper presents a lower bound of Ω(log n) on the solo step complexity of obstruction-free binary anonymous consensus. The proof constructs a sequence of executions in which more and more distinct variables are about to be written to, and then uses the backtracking covering technique to obtain a single execution in which many variables are accessed.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationDistributed Computing - 30th International Symposium, DISC 2016, Proceedings
EditorsCyril Gavoille, David Ilcinkas
Pages257-268
Number of pages12
DOIs
StatePublished - 1 Jan 2016
Event30th International Symposium on Distributed Computing, DISC 2016 - Paris, France
Duration: 27 Sep 201629 Sep 2016

Publication series

NameLecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics)
Volume9888 LNCS

Conference

Conference30th International Symposium on Distributed Computing, DISC 2016
Country/TerritoryFrance
CityParis
Period27/09/1629/09/16

All Science Journal Classification (ASJC) codes

  • Theoretical Computer Science
  • General Computer Science

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