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M. Schwarz, K. Winkler, U. Schmid:
"Fast Consensus Under Eventually Stabilizing Message Adversaries";
Talk: 17th International Conference on Distributed Computing and Networking, Singapore; 2016-01-04 - 2016-01-07; in: "Proceedings of the 17th International Conference on Distributed Computing and Networking", ACM, (2016), ISBN: 978-1-4503-4032-8; 1 - 10.

This paper is devoted to deterministic consensus in synchronous dynamic networks with unidirectional links, which are under the control of an omniscient message adversary. Motivated by unpredictable node/system initialization times and long-lasting periods of massive transient faults, we consider message adversaries that guarantee periods of less erratic message loss only eventually: We present a tight bound of 2D+1 for the termination time of consensus under a message adversary that eventually guarantees a single vertex-stable root component with dynamic network diameter D, as well as a simple algorithm that matches this bound. It effectively halves the termination time 4D+1 achieved by the fastest consensus algorithm known so far. We also introduce a generalized, considerably stronger variant of our message adversary, and show that our new algorithm, unlike the existing one, still works correctly under it.

Directed dynamic network; consensus; message adversary; stability; root component

http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2833312.2833323