Distributed consensus

Distributed Consensus with Unreliable Channels

Distributed consensus - i.e., the problem of getting a set of processes to agree on a certain action or value over a network - is a fundamental problem of distributed computing. It arises in settings that range from group membership (i.e., tracking the set of servers in a server group that are currently online) to distributed database commits. And yet, despite its pervasiveness, it is anything but simple to solve.