The weakest failure detector to implement a register in asynchronous systems with hybrid communication

• Published in: Theoretical computer science Vol. 512; pp. 130 - 142
• Main Authors: Imbs, Damien, Raynal, Michel
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Elsevier B.V 11.11.2013
• Subjects: Asynchronous message-passing system; Atomic register; Distributed algorithm; Failure detector; Fault-tolerance; Hybrid communication; Necessity proof; Process crash; Shared memory system; Weakest failure detector; Process crash; Failure detector; Necessity proof; Hybrid communication; Asynchronous message-passing system; Distributed algorithm; Shared memory system; Weakest failure detector; Fault-tolerance; Atomic register
• ISSN: 0304-3975; 1879-2294
• DOI: 10.1016/j.tcs.2012.06.030

This paper introduces an asynchronous crash-prone hybrid system model. The system is hybrid in the way the processes can communicate. On the one side, a process can send messages to any other process. On another side, the processes are partitioned into clusters and each cluster has its own read/write shared memory. In addition to the model, a main contribution of the paper concerns the implementation of an atomic register in this system model. More precisely, a new failure detector (denoted MΣ) is introduced and it is shown that, when considering the information on failures needed to implement a register, this failure detector is the weakest. To that end, the paper presents an MΣ-based algorithm that builds a register in the considered hybrid system model and shows that it is possible to extract MΣ from any failure detector-based algorithm that implements a register in this model. The paper also (a) shows that MΣ is strictly weaker than Σ (which is the weakest failure detector to implement a register in a classical message-passing system) and (b) presents a necessary and sufficient condition to implement MΣ in a hybrid asynchronous communication system.