Delivery delay and mobile faults

Dimitris Sakavalas, Boston College
Lewis Tseng, Boston College

Abstract

In this work we address the problem of reaching approximate consensus in a complete network of n nodes, where message deliveries can be delayed by at most d time-steps. We consider a mobile adversary, which corrupts at most f nodes in any step, modeled as a synchronous round. We explicitly study how d affects the feasibility of the problem. More precisely, we propose a framework to analyze mobile fault-tolerance in the presence of message delays. We prove that approximate consensus is feasible if and only if n > 4df. We assume no knowledge of time (round index) by the nodes; instead, in our model, whenever a message is sent, it is timestamped by the communication channel. We propose the tight TimeStamps algorithm, which utilizes timestamps to optimally bound the number of faulty messages.