Visiting Byzantine Agreement underlying Ad Hoc environment

Abstract

The Mobile Ad Hoc Network (MANET) has become more popular because the MANET is a self-organizing, self-configuring, and an instantly deployable multi-hop wireless network that responds to application needs without any fixed infrastructure. Moreover, the MANET is fault-tolerant and reliable. A mechanism is needed in the MANET that allows a set of nodes to agree on a common value. The distributed Byzantine Agreement (BA) problem is one of the most important issues in designing a fault-tolerant system. In many cases, reaching a common agreement among fault-free nodes in coping with the influence from faulty components is crucial in a fault-tolerant system. When a common agreement is achieved, all fault-free nodes in the system can produce stable results without any influence from the faulty components. In this study, the BA problem is visited in a MANET, in which the components are subject to a malicious fault. The proposed protocol can tolerate the maximum number of allowable faulty nodes using a minimum number of message exchange rounds. Each fault-free node can reach a common agreement value for the BA problem in a MANET.