Stubborn Communication Channels
Rachid Guerraoui, Rodolfo Oliveira, A. Schiper · 1998
This paper aims at bridging the gap between the assumption of reliable channels by fault-tolerant distributed algorithms and the weak reliability of feasible communication channels. We define a new kind of communication channels which we call Stubborn channels. Stubborn channels are easily implementable over a connectionless network layer and, although weak, the reliability guarantees offered by Stubborn channels are sufficient to solve the fundamental Consensus problem in asynchronous systems with unreliable failure detectors. 1 Introduction Literature on fault-tolerant distributed algorithms in the asynchronous computation model often assumes that the communication between processes is reliable. A reliable communication channel can roughly be characterized as a channel where all messages that are sent are received, provided that the receiver process does not crash [2]. In practice, implementation of reliable channels poses two problems. The first problem is to guarantee the eventual...