Adaptive timeliness of consensus in presence of crash and timing faults

The Δ-timed uniform consensus is a stronger variant of the traditional consensus and it satisfies the following additional property: every correct process terminates its execution within a constant time Δ (Δ-timeliness), and no two processes decide differently (uniformity). In this paper, we consider the Δ-timed uniform consensus problem in presence of fc crash processes and ft timing-faulty processes, and propose a Δ-timed uniform consensus algorithm. The proposed algorithm is adaptive in the following sense: it solves the Δ-timed uniform consensus when at least ft+1 correct processes exist in the system. If the system has less than ft+1 correct processes, the algorithm cannot solve the Δ-timed uniform consensus. However, as long as ft+1 processes are non-crashed, the algorithm solves (non-timed) uniform consensus. We also investigate the maximum number of faulty processes that can be tolerated. We show that any Δ-timed uniform consensus algorithm tolerating up to ft timing-faulty processes requires that the system has at least ft+1 correct processes. This impossibility result implies that the proposed algorithm attains the maximum resilience about the number of faulty processes. We also show that any Δ-timed uniform consensus algorithm tolerating up to ft timing-faulty processes cannot solve the (non-timed) uniform consensus when the system has less than ft+1 non-crashed processes. This impossibility result implies that our algorithm attains the maximum adaptiveness.