Simple and Efficient Signature-based Consensus Protocol in the Asynchronous Distributed System

Abstract

The consensus problem in distributed systems is mainly solved by message exchange. Most of previous consensus algorithms rely on exchange of oral messages to achieve consensus among processors. As oral messages are susceptible to influences from malicious attackers, this type of consensus protocols usually requires a large number of rounds of message exchange, and the complexity of message exchange is also excessively high. In light of this drawback of oral message-based consensus algorithms, some scholars proposed signed message-based consensus algorithm to reduce the number of rounds of message exchange required. However, some signed message-based consensus algorithms still have certain drawbacks which make them ineffective in some conditions. To address this issue, we propose a new signed message-based consensus algorithm in this paper. We integrate the concept of grouping into the proposed algorithm and find the best number of groups through mathematical analysis to further reduce the rounds of message exchange required. In other words, the proposed algorithm makes use of digital signature and the concept of grouping to solve the consensus problem. This algorithm can not only increase the fault-tolerance of distributed systems but also significantly reduce the rounds of message exchange required to achieve consensus.

New Anatomy of Trustworthy Mobile Cloud Computing

“…The problem has been studied by various kinds of network model in the past [21]. In other words, the consensus problem had been solved in a Fully Connected Network (FCN) [22,23,24], a Broad-Casting Network (BCN) [21,25], or a Generalize Connected Network (GCN) [7,26]. Table 1 summarizes the results of previous works dealing with the consensus problem in different network structures.…”

“…According to previous studies, the network topology plays an important role in this problem [7]. However, a FCN-based cloud can be viewed as a special cluster-based MCC with n clusters and each cluster contains one node only where n is the total number of nodes in the cluster-based MCC.…”

“…In a MCC, the network is assumed reliable and synchronous [7]. The protocols of reaching consensus are required so that the distributed system still can be well performed even if certain components were failed by inner damage or outer intruder.…”

A Study of Positive Exponential Consensus on DeGroot Model

“…Moreover, most studies with solution domain are related to the agreement protocol presented in [28] and [29]. Cheng et al [30] achieved a reaching agreement for MAS by increasing the fault-tolerance in distributed systems and decreasing the message iterations by proposing an algorithm using digital signature and grouping. Nonlinear dynamic systems, on the other hand, were studied in [31] for leader-based consensus on the MAS neural network.…”