On the Weakest Failure Detector for Quiescent Reliable Communication
Marcos K. Aguilera, Wei Chen, Sam Toueg · eCommons (Cornell University) · 1997
We consider the problem of achieving reliable communication with quiescent algorithms (i.e., algorithms that eventually stop sending messages) in asynchronous systems with process crashes and lossy links, and show that, among failure detectors with bounded output size, \\SigmaP is the weakest one that can be used to solve this problem. Combined with a result in [ACT97], this shows that failure detectors that are commonly used in practice, i.e., those that output lists of suspects, are not always the best ones to solve a problem. 1 Introduction In [ACT97], we considered the problem of achieving reliable communication with quiescent algorithms (i.e., algorithms that eventually stop sending messages) in asynchronous systems with process crashes and lossy links. In that paper, we show that this problem can be solved with heartbeat, a failure detector that can be implemented in such systems (without timeouts). Unlike failure detectors that are commonly considered in the literature and used...