Asynchronous bounded lifetime failure detectors

A failure detector provides processes with a single primitive that, each time it is invoked, returns to the invoking process information related to failures. This research note extends failure detectors by allowing processes to invoke an additional primitive whose effect is to limit the time scope of some properties offered by the failure detector. This simple addition makes possible to weaken the definition of failure detector classes without weakening their power. Two distributed computing problems are used to illustrate the benefit of such an approach, namely the consensus problem and the construction of an atomic register.