The impossibility of implementing reliable communication in the face of crashes
Alan David Fekete, Nancy Ann Lynch, Yishay Mansour, John M. Spinelli · Journal of the ACM · 1993
An important function of communication networks is to implement reliable data transfer over an unreliable underlying network.Formal specifications are given for reliable and unreliable communication layers, in terms of 1/0 automata.Based on these specifications, it is proved that no reliable communication protocol can tolerate crashes of the processors on which the protocol runs.