On conspiracies and hyperfairness in distributed computing

Abstract

We study the phenomenon of conspiracies, a certain class of livelocks, in distributed computations. This elementary phenomenon occurs in systems with shared variables, shared actions as well as in message-passing systems, We propose a new and simple characterization via a new notion of hyperfairness, which postulates the absence of conspiracies. We argue that hyperfairness is a useful tool for understanding some impossibility results, in particular results involving crash-tolerance. As a main result, we show that a large subclass of hyperfairness can be implemented through partial synchrony and randomization. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2005.