Reliable broadcast in synchronous and asynchronous environments (Preliminary version)

Abstract

This paper studies the problem of reliable broadcast of a sequence of values in a system subject to processor failures. We consider three failure models — crash, in which a processor may stop executing at any time, send omission, in which processors may intermittently fail to send messages and general omission, in which processors may intermittently fail to send and receive messages — in both synchronous (the “round model”) and asynchronous systems. In contrast to the Byzantine Generals formulation of reliable broadcast, the problem we consider can be solved for asynchronous systems. In synchronous systems, we first present an algorithm tolerant of crash failures, and use translation techniques to derive algorithms tolerant of send omission failures and general omission failures. For asynchronous systems, we present simple algorithms tolerant of all three failure models.