Byzantine Generals and Transaction Commit Protocols

Original paper: NO_ITEM_DATA:lamportByzantineGeneralsTransaction

Summary

  • This work claims that the transaction commit problem in distributed systems is an instance of the weak Byzantine Generals problem.
  • As a consequence, they show that the \(t+1\) round lower bound to tolerate \(t\) faults holds true even for the commit problem.
  • They present a nice protocol for this in Section 4. It looks like DS but with some early-termination like properties.

Notes

  • They say that the transaction commit is a 0-1 agreement with a dedicated coordinator.
  • They first reduce WBG with a binary set.

References

NO_ITEM_DATA:lamportByzantineGeneralsTransaction