The Discovery of Consensus Underlying a Dual Fallible Cloud Computing Environment

Abstract

Cloud computing is Internet based development and use of computer technology. It is a style of computing in which dynamically scalable and often virtualized resources are provided as a service over the Internet. In cloud computing, users need not have knowledge of, expertise in, or control over the technology infrastructure that supports them. However, cloud computing is a new concept of distributed computing. Moreover, the distributed consensus problem is one of the most important problems in designing a fault-tolerant distributed system. In prior work, the consensus problem was solved in a Fully Connected Network (FCN) or a General Connectivity Network (GCN) with fallible transmission media. However, the topology of cloud computing is not a certainty structure. Unfortunately, existing consensus problem and results cannot cope with the new computing environment and the consensus problem thus needs to be revisited. In this paper, the Cloud Consensus Protocol (CCP) is proposed to solve the consensus with dual faulty transmission media. In another word, the fault tolerant capability is enlarged by allowing both dormant faults and malicious faults transmission media exist simultaneously in the topology of cloud computing. In this paper, the protocol that we proposed can make all healthy nodes reaching consensus with minimal rounds of message exchange and tolerate the maximal number of allowable faulty components.