We study consensus in a message-passing system where only some of the n^2 links exhibit some synchrony. This problem was previously studied for systems with process crashes; we now consider byzantine failures. We show that consensus can be solved in a system where there is at least one non-faulty process whose links are eventually timely; all other links can be arbitrarily slow. We also show that, in terms of problem solvability, such a system is strictly weaker than one where all links are eventually timely.
Citation:
Marcos K. Aguilera, Carole Delporte-Gallet, Hugues Fauconnier, Sam Toueg, "Consensus with Byzantine Failures and Little System Synchrony," dsn, pp.147-155, International Conference on Dependable Systems and Networks (DSN'06), 2006