Abstract
The goal of decentralized consensus protocols is to exchange information among computers so that each computer acquires information held by every other computer in the system. The authors introduce a unifying framework which generalizes these decentralized consensus protocols. A necessary and sufficient property for consensus protocols, which uses k round of message exchange, is presented. S. Yuan and A.K. Agrawala's (1988) k-dimensional array based protocol can be viewed in this unifying framework. The authors introduce a novel class of protocols within the unifying framework, called quorum-based protocols. Quorum-based protocols are obtained by observing only the necessary properties which must be maintained. They use two rounds of message exchange (i.e. k=2) and have the property that the first and second rounds of message exchange use the same connection. This property may be exploited if the underlying network provides connection-oriented service. Quorum-based protocols include the centralized protocol and T.V. Lakshman and A.K. Agrawala's (1986) protocol. By applying finite projective planes directly, the authors obtain a protocol which reduces the number of required messages to half the number required in Lakshman and Agrawala's protocol. >
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