Eventually consistent failure detectors

Abstract

The concept of unreliable failure detecto was introduced by Chandra and Toueg [2] as a mechanism that provides (possibly incorrect) information about process failures. This mechanism has been used to solve different problems in async hronous systems, in particular the Consensus problem.In this paper, we present a new class of unreliable failure detectors, which we call Eventually Consistent and denote by ♦C. This class adds to the failure detection capabilities of other classes an eventual leader election capability. We study the relationship between ♦C and other classes of failure detectors. We also propose an efficient algorithm to transform ♦C into ♦P. Finally, to show the power of this new class of failure detectors, we present an efficient Consensus algorithm based on ♦C. Due to space limitation, the reader is referred to [4] for an in-depth presentation of the algorithms. Here, we only present their general idea.