The impossibility of implementing reliable communication in the face of crashes

Fekete, Alan; Lynch, Nancy; Mansour, Yishay; Spinelli, John

doi:10.1145/174147.169676

Cited by 46 publications

(22 citation statements)

References 16 publications

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“…In this paper, we investigate the power of crash failures for protocols other than Data Link and Transport protocols. Our first theorem generalizes the Data Link result in Fekete et al [1993] to a statement that applies to arbitrary protocols. Thus, our theorem can also be used to show new results besides the Data Link result: For instance, the impossibility of token passing or resource allocation with crash failures and no NVM.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 69%

“…We start by comparing the power of three link models used and providing an intuitive statement of the three results. We then sketch an important construction underlying the Data Link impossibility result of Fekete et al [1993], and show how to generalize the construction to a new construction that we call concatenation. We then describe intuitively how concatenation can be used to present the results for all three link models.…”

Section: Intuition Behind Main Theoremsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…2 An earlier result by Baratz and Segall [1988] showed that the widely deployed Data Link protocol HDLC could work incorrectly if nodes did not keep nonvolatile memory and the links could lose messages. Later, Fekete et al [1993] showed that no Data Link protocol could work correctly under these assumptions. Attiya et al [1995] proved a similar result regarding Transport protocols.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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The fault span of crash failures

Varghese

Jayaram

2000

J. ACM

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Abstract. A crashing network protocol is an asynchronous protocol whose memory does not survive crashes. We show that a crashing network protocol that works over unreliable links can be driven to arbitrary global states, where each node is in a state reached in some (possibly different) execution, and each link has an arbitrary mixture of packets sent in (possibly different) executions. Our theorem considerably generalizes an earlier result, due to Fekete et al., which states that there is no correct crashing Data Link Protocol. For example, we prove that there is no correct crashing protocol for token passing and for many other resource allocation protocols such as k-exclusion, and the drinking and dining philosophers problems. We further characterize the reachable states caused by crash failures using reliable non-FIFO and reliable FIFO links. We show that with reliable non-FIFO links any acyclic subset of nodes and links can be driven to arbitrary states. We show that with reliable FIFO links, only nodes can be driven to arbitrary states. Overall, we show a strict hierarchy in terms of the set of states reachable by crash failures in the three link models.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 69%

Section: Intuition Behind Main Theoremsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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The fault span of crash failures

Varghese

Jayaram

2000

J. ACM

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“…According to the impossibility theory [2] and the possibility of delivering reliable service using faulty components [4], addressing the scalability challenges requires a paradigm shift: from IPaddressable programming to content addressable programming. This paper reports a single-sided Statistic Multiplexed Computing (SMC) paradigm in order to circumvent the impossibility and to fully leverage the possibility of statistic multiplexing.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…A reexamination of the 1993 proof of the impossibility of implementing reliable communication in the face of crashes [2] exposed the root cause of the alleged fallacy: the robust communication protocols are ineffective when either the sender or the receiver in the end-to-end communication could crash arbitrarily. No error detection and recovery methods can reverse this impossibility.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Scalability Dilemma and Statistic Multiplexed Computing — A Theory and Experiment

Shi¹

2017

Adv. sci. technol. eng. syst. j.

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Connection Management Without Retaining Information

Attiya

Welch

1995

Information and Computation

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Managing a connection between two hosts in a network is an important service to provide in order to make the network useful for many applications. The two main sub-problems are the management of serial incarnations of a connection and the transfer of messages within an incarnation. This paper investigates whether it is necessary for connection management protocols to retain state information across node crashes and between incarnations.

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The impossibility of implementing reliable communication in the face of crashes

Cited by 46 publications

References 16 publications

The fault span of crash failures

The fault span of crash failures

Scalability Dilemma and Statistic Multiplexed Computing — A Theory and Experiment

Connection Management Without Retaining Information

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