Brief Announcement: Asynchronous Approximate Agreement with Quadratic Communication

Abstract

We consider an asynchronous network of n message-sending parties, up to t of which are byzantine. We study approximate agreement, where the parties obtain approximately equal outputs in the convex hull of their inputs. In their seminal work, Abraham, Amit and Dolev [OPODIS '04] solve this problem in ℝ with the optimal resilience t < n/3 with a protocol where each party reliably broadcasts a value in every iteration. This takes Θ(n²) messages per reliable broadcast, or Θ(n³) messages per iteration.
In this work, we forgo reliable broadcast to achieve asynchronous approximate agreement against t < n/3 faults with quadratic communication. In a tree with the maximum degree Δ and the centroid decomposition height h, we achieve edge agreement in at most 6h + 1 rounds with 𝒪(n²) messages of size 𝒪(log Δ + log h) per round. We do this by designing a 6-round multivalued 2-graded consensus protocol and using it to recursively reduce the task to edge agreement in a subtree with a smaller centroid decomposition height. Then, we achieve edge agreement in the infinite path ℤ, again with the help of 2-graded consensus. Finally, we show that our edge agreement protocol enables ε-agreement in ℝ in 6log₂M/(ε) + 𝒪(log log M/(ε)) rounds with 𝒪(n² log M/(ε)) messages and 𝒪(n²log M/(ε)log log M/(ε)) bits of communication, where M is the maximum non-byzantine input magnitude.