Timeout-based adaptive consensus
Mônica Dixit, Henrique Moniz, António Casimiro · 2012
Algorithms for solving distributed systems problems often use timeouts as a means to achieve progress. They are designed in a way that safety is always preserved despite timeouts being too small or too large. A conservatively large static timeout value is usually selected, such that the overall system performance is acceptable in the normal case. This approach is good enough in stable environments, but it may compromise performance in more dynamic settings, such as in wireless networks. In this case, a better approach is to dynamically adjusting timeouts according to the observed network conditions.