About the Relationship between Election Problem and Failure Detector in Asynchronous Distributed Systems

摘要

This paper is about the relationship between Election problem and Failure Detector in asynchronous distributed systems. We first discuss the relationship between the Election problem and the Consensus problem in asynchronous distributed systems with unreliable failure detectors. Chandra and Toueg have stated that Consensus is solvable in asynchronous systems with unreliable failure detectors. But, in contrast to the Consensus problem, the Election problem is impossible to solve with unreliable failure detectors even with a single crash failure. More precisely, the weakest failure detector that is needed to solve this problem is a Perfect Failure Detector, which is strictly stronger than the weakest failure detector that is needed to solve Consensus.