A bivalency proof of the lower bound for uniform consensus

Abstract

Bivalency argument is a widely-used technique that employs forward induction to show impossibility results and lower bounds related to consensus. However, for a synchronous distributed system of n processes with up to t potential and f actual crash failures, applying bivalency argument to prove the lower bound for reaching uniform consensus is still an open problem. In this paper, we address this problem by presenting a bivalency proof that the lower bound for reaching uniform consensus is (f+2)-rounds where 0≤f≤t-2. © 2005 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.