Abstract
Consensus is an important building block for building replicated systems, and many consensus protocols have been proposed. In this paper, we investigate the building blocks of consensus protocols and use these building blocks to assemble a skeleton that can be configured to produce, among others, three well-known consensus protocols: Paxos, Chandra-Toueg, and Ben-Or. Although each of these protocols specifies only one quorum system explicitly, all also employ a second quorum system. We use the skeleton to implement a replicated service, allowing us to compare the performance of these consensus protocols under various workloads and failure scenarios.
This work is supported by AFOSR grants FA8750-06-2-0060, FA9550-06-1-0019, FA9550-06-1-0244, the National Science Foundation under grants 0424422, 0430161 and CCF-0424422 (TRUST), a gift from Microsoft Corporation, and ISF, ISOC, and CCR. Any opinions expressed in this publication are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the funding agencies.
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Song, Y.J., van Renesse, R., Schneider, F.B., Dolev, D. (2007). The Building Blocks of Consensus. In: Rao, S., Chatterjee, M., Jayanti, P., Murthy, C.S.R., Saha, S.K. (eds) Distributed Computing and Networking. ICDCN 2008. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 4904. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-77444-0_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-77444-0_5
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