The Impossibility of Implementing Reliable Communication in the Face of Crashes

Abstract

An important function of communication networks is to implement reliable data transfer over an unreliable underlying network. Formal specifications are given for reliable and unreliable communication layers, in terms of 1/0 automata. Based on these specifications, it is proved that no reliable communication protocol can tolerate crashes of the processors on which the protocol runs. © 1993, ACM. All rights reserved.