Quorums Systems as a Method to Enhance Collaboration for Achieving Fault Tolerance in Distributed System

Abstract

A system that implements the byzantine agreement algorithm is supposed to be very reliable and robust because of its fault tolerating feature. For very realistic environments, byzantine agreement protocols becomes inadequate, because they are based on the assumption that failures are controlled and they have unlimited severity. The byzantine agreement model works with a number of bounded failures that have to be tolerated. It is never concerned to identify these failures or to exclude them from the system. In this paper, we tackle quorum systems, which is a particular sort of distributed systems where some storage or computations are replicated on various machines in the idea that some of them work correctly to produce a reliable output at some given moment of time. Thus, by majority voting collaboration with quorums, one can achieve fault tolerance in distributed systems. Further, we argue that an algorithm to identify faulty-behaving machines is useful to identify purposeful malicious behaviors.

Keywords

• fault tolerance
• quorum systems
• distributed computing
• byzantine faults