A simple proof of the necessity of the failure detector Σ to implement an atomic register in asynchronous message-passing systems

Abstract

This paper presents a simple proof that shows that the quorum failure detector class (denoted Σ) is the weakest failure detector class required to implement an atomic read/write register in an asynchronous message-passing system prone to an arbitrary number of process crashes. This proof is based on a new reduction algorithm in which all the variables are bounded.