FORMATS-FTRTFT 2004 START ConferenceManager    


A Unified Fault-Tolerance Protocol

Paul Miner, Alfons Geser, Lee Pike, and Jeffrey Maddalon

Presented at Formal Modelling and Analysis of Timed Systems - Formal Techniques in Real-Time and Fault Tolerant System (FORMATS-FTRTFT 2004), Grenoble, France, September 22-24, 2004


Abstract

Davies and Wakerly show that Byzantine fault tolerance can be achieved by a cascade of broadcasts and middle value select functions. We present an extension of the Davies and Wakerly protocol, the unified protocol, and its proof of correctness. We prove that it satisfies validity and agreement properties for communication of exact values. We then introduce bounded communication error into the model. Inexact communication is inherent for clock synchronization protocols. We prove that validity and agreement properties hold for inexact communication, and that exact communication is a special case. As a running example, we illustrate the unified protocol using the SPIDER family of fault-tolerant architectures. In particular we demonstrate that the SPIDER interactive consistency, distributed diagnosis, and clock synchronization protocols are instances of the unified protocol.


  
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