Distributed consensus with general omission failures and timing uncertainty

In a distributed concensus protocol, a number of processors communicating by message passing start with some initial values. The protocol terminates with all nonfaulty processors agreeing on one of these values. The authors investigate the time needed to reach consensus in partially synchronous systems under various classes of processor failures. They provide the first asymptotically optimal distributed consensus protocol for semi-synchronous systems that tolerates general omission failures. When the failures occurring are restricted to omission and crash failures, the protocol terminates faster, matching the best known protocols for these failure classes.<>