Fault tolerance management in distributed systems: A new leader-based consensus algorithm

Abstract

It is well known that consensus algorithms are fundamental building blocks for fault tolerant distributed systems. In the literature of consensus, many algorithms have been proposed to solve this problem in different system models but few attempts have been made to analyze their performance. In this paper we present a new leader-based consensus algorithm (FLC algorithm) for the crash-stop failure model. Our algorithm uses the leader oracle Ω and adapts a decentralized communication pattern. In addition, we analyze and compare the performance of our algorithm to four of the most well-known consensus algorithms among asynchronous distributed systems of the crash-stop failure model. Our results give a global idea of the performance of these algorithms and show that our algorithm gives the best performance when process crashes take place in a system using a multicast network model. At the same time, our algorithm also gives a very acceptable performance, even when crashes occur in a unicast network model and in the case where no process crashes happen within the system.