Byzantine-Tolerant Set-Constrained Delivery Broadcast

Set-Constrained Delivery Broadcast (SCD-broadcast), recently introduced at ICDCN 2018, is a high-level communication abstraction that captures ordering properties not between individual messages but between sets of messages. More precisely, it allows processes to broadcast messages and deliver sets of messages, under the constraint that if a process delivers a set containing a message m before a set containing a message m\u27, then no other process delivers first a set containing m\u27 and later a set containing m. It has been shown that SCD-broadcast and read/write registers are computationally equivalent, and an algorithm implementing SCD-broadcast is known in the context of asynchronous message passing systems prone to crash failures. This paper introduces a Byzantine-tolerant SCD-broadcast algorithm, which we call BSCD-broadcast. Our proposed algorithm assumes an underlying basic Byzantine-tolerant reliable broadcast abstraction. We first introduce an intermediary communication primitive, Byzantine FIFO broadcast (BFIFO-broadcast), which we then use as a primitive in our final BSCD-broadcast algorithm. Unlike the original SCD-broadcast algorithm that is tolerant to up to t<n/2 crashing processes, and unlike the underlying Byzantine reliable broadcast primitive that is tolerant to up to t<n/3 Byzantine processes, our BSCD-broadcast algorithm is tolerant to up to t<n/4 Byzantine processes. As an illustration of the high abstraction power provided by the BSCD-broadcast primitive, we show that it can be used to implement a Byzantine-tolerant read/write snapshot object in an extremely simple way

Optimal Collision/Conflict-free Distance-2 Coloring in Synchronous Broadcast/Receive Tree Networks

This article is on message-passing systems where communication is (a) synchronous and (b) based on the "broadcast/receive" pair of communication operations. "Synchronous" means that time is discrete and appears as a sequence of time slots (or rounds) such that each message is received in the very same round in which it is sent. "Broadcast/receive" means that during a round a process can either broadcast a message to its neighbors or receive a message from one of them. In such a communication model, no two neighbors of the same process, nor a process and any of its neighbors, must be allowed to broadcast during the same time slot (thereby preventing message collisions in the first case, and message conflicts in the second case). From a graph theory point of view, the allocation of slots to processes is know as the distance-2 coloring problem: a color must be associated with each process (defining the time slots in which it will be allowed to broadcast) in such a way that any two processes at distance at most 2 obtain different colors, while the total number of colors is "as small as possible". The paper presents a parallel message-passing distance-2 coloring algorithm suited to trees, whose roots are dynamically defined. This algorithm, which is itself collision-free and conflict-free, uses $\Delta + 1$ colors where $\Delta$ is the maximal degree of the graph (hence the algorithm is color-optimal). It does not require all processes to have different initial identities, and its time complexity is $O(d \Delta)$, where d is the depth of the tree. As far as we know, this is the first distributed distance-2 coloring algorithm designed for the broadcast/receive round-based communication model, which owns all the previous properties.Comment: 19 pages including one appendix. One Figur

Anonymous Obstruction-free (n,k)(n,k)-Set Agreement with n−k+1n-k+1 Atomic Read/Write Registers

The $k$-set agreement problem is a generalization of the consensus problem. Namely, assuming each process proposes a value, each non-faulty process has to decide a value such that each decided value was proposed, and no more than $k$ different values are decided. This is a hard problem in the sense that it cannot be solved in asynchronous systems as soon as $k$ or more processes may crash. One way to circumvent this impossibility consists in weakening its termination property, requiring that a process terminates (decides) only if it executes alone during a long enough period. This is the well-known obstruction-freedom progress condition. Considering a system of $n$ {\it anonymous asynchronous} processes, which communicate through atomic {\it read/write registers only}, and where {\it any number of processes may crash}, this paper addresses and solves the challenging open problem of designing an obstruction-free $k$-set agreement algorithm with $(n-k+1)$ atomic registers only. From a shared memory cost point of view, this algorithm is the best algorithm known so far, thereby establishing a new upper bound on the number of registers needed to solve the problem (its gain is $(n-k)$ with respect to the previous upper bound). The algorithm is then extended to address the repeated version of $(n,k)$-set agreement. As it is optimal in the number of atomic read/write registers, this algorithm closes the gap on previously established lower/upper bounds for both the anonymous and non-anonymous versions of the repeated $(n,k)$-set agreement problem. Finally, for 1 \leq x\leq k \textless{} n, a generalization suited to $x$-obstruction-freedom is also described, which requires $(n-k+x)$ atomic registers only

A Look at Basics of Distributed Computing *

International audienceThis paper presents concepts and basics of distributed computing which are important (at least from the author's point of view), and should be known and mastered by Master students and engineers. Those include: (a) a characterization of distributed computing (which is too much often confused with parallel computing); (b) the notion of a synchronous system and its associated notions of a local algorithm and message adversaries; (c) the notion of an asynchronous shared memory system and its associated notions of universality and progress conditions; and (d) the notion of an asynchronous message-passing system with its associated broadcast and agreement abstractions, its impossibility results, and approaches to circumvent them. Hence, the paper can be seen as a guided tour to key elements that constitute basics of distributed computing