AllConcur: Leaderless Concurrent Atomic Broadcast

10 years ago (arxiv.org)

Paper's network assumptions:

"We assume a model of reliable communication—messages cannot be lost (only delayed). This is a reasonable assumption if we consider a reliable protocol, such as TCP."

Paxos network assumptions:

"Messages can take arbitrarily long to be delivered, can be duplicated, and can be lost, but they are not corrupted." - http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/lamport/pubs/p...

  • Sounds like Paxos could be implemented on top of UDP whereas AllConcur requires TCP?

    • Duplicated and lost messages will happen in practice - TCP attempts to build reliable communication on an unreliable medium. Not clear from the paper if this matters.

      I think the larger misunderstanding of the paper is the requirement that paxos have a leader - lamport's synod algorithm does not require a leader, the leader is an optimization!

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