Solving the consensus problem in a dynamic group: an approach suitable for a mobile environment

Abstract

It is now well recognised that the consensus problem is a fundamental problem when one has to implement fault-tolerant distributed services. We extend the consensus paradigm to asynchronous distributed mobile systems prone to disconnection and process crash failures. The paper, first, shows that a consensus problem between mobile hosts is reducible to two agreement problems (a consensus problem and a group membership problem) between fixed hosts. Then, following an approach investigated by Guerraoui and Schiper (see IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, vol.27, no.1, p.29-41, 2001), the paper uses a genetic consensus service as a basic building block to construct a modular and simple solution.