Eventually Byzantine Agreement on CDS-based mobile ad hoc network

Reliability is an important research topic in the study of distributed systems. Under many circumstances, a healthy processor in a distributed system needs to reach a common agreement before performing some special tasks even if the faults exist. In order to achieve fault-tolerance in distributed systems, one must deal with the Byzantine Agreement (BA) problem. Most BA problem require all the healthy processors to obtain an agreement at the same round, this kind of agreement is called an Immediate Byzantine Agreement (IBA). Another kind of agreement, Eventual Byzantine Agreement (EBA), allows its participants to reach a common agreement at different rounds when the f(act) < f(p) (f(act) is the number of actual arbitrary faulty processors; f(p) is the number of tolerate arbitrary faulty processors). However, the traditional EBA problem is solved in well-defined networks, but the Mobile Ad hoc NETworks (MANETs) are increasing in popularity. Therefore, EBA problem is revisited under dual failure mode (processors and transmission media) in the MANET. The proposed protocol, Early Dual Agreement Protocol (EDAP), can achieve agreement while tolerating the maximum number of faulty processors and transmission media in a MANET by using the minimum number of message exchanges. Furthermore, our protocol can manage and organize the network efficiently even if the processors move around the network. (C) 2011 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.