Impact of a failure detection mechanism on the performance of consensus

The paper considers a consensus algorithm for an asynchronous system augmented with failure detectors, and analyzes the impact on its termination time of various implementations of failure detectors. The study shows that the design of fault-tolerant distributed algorithms in the asynchronous system model augmented with failure detectors is orthogonal to implementing the actual failure detectors. This nicely decouples logical issues (proof of correctness) from engineering issues (e.g., performance and timing constraints).