Using failure detectors to solve Consensus in asynchronous shared-memory systems

Wai-Kau Lo and Vassos Hadzilacos

Chandra and Toueg proposed a new approach to overcome the impossibility of reaching Consensus in asynchronous message-passing systems with a (possibly unreliable) failure detector. Informally, a failure detector provides some information about the processes that have crashed during an execution of the system. In this paper, we present several Consensus algorithms using different types of failure detectors in asynchronous shared-memory systems. We also prove several lower bounds and impossibility results regarding solving Consensus using failure detectors in asynchronous shared-memory systems.