Recent results on fault-tolerant consensus in message-passing networks

Abstract

Fault-tolerant consensus has been studied extensively in the literature, because it is one of the important distributed primitives and has wide applications in practice. This paper surveys important works on fault-tolerant consensus in message-passing networks, and the focus is on results from the past decade. Particularly, we categorize the results into two groups: new problem formulations and practical applications. In the first part, we discuss new ways to define the consensus problem, which include larger input domains, enriched correctness properties, different network models, etc. In the second part, we focus on real-world systems that use Paxos or Raft to reach consensus, and Byzantine Fault-Tolerant (BFT) systems. We also discuss Bitcoin, which can be related to solving Byzantine consensus in anonymous systems, and compare Bitcoin with BFT systems and Byzantine consensus algorithms.