2026-07-24T02:02:37Z https://drops.dagstuhl.de/oai

oai:drops-oai.dagstuhl.de:21271 2024-10-24T07:40:09Z ddc:004 open_access

Brief Announcement: Unifying Partial Synchrony Constantinescu, Andrei Ghinea, Diana Sliwinski, Jakub Wattenhofer, Roger partial synchrony unknown latency global stabilization time The distributed computing literature considers multiple options for modeling communication. Most simply, communication is categorized as either synchronous or asynchronous. Synchronous communication assumes that messages get delivered within a publicly known timeframe and that parties' clocks are synchronized. Asynchronous communication, on the other hand, only assumes that messages get delivered eventually. A more nuanced approach, or a middle ground between the two extremes, is given by the partially synchronous model, which is arguably the most realistic option. This model comes in two commonly considered flavors: ii) The Global Stabilization Time (GST) model: after an (unknown) amount of time, the network becomes synchronous. This captures scenarios where network issues are transient. iii) The Unknown Latency (UL) model: the network is, in fact, synchronous, but the message delay bound is unknown. This work formally establishes that any time-agnostic property that can be achieved by a protocol in the UL model can also be achieved by a (possibly different) protocol in the GST model. By time-agnostic, we mean properties that can depend on the order in which events happen but not on time as measured by the parties. Most properties considered in distributed computing are time-agnostic. The converse was already known, even without the time-agnostic requirement, so our result shows that the two network conditions are, under one sensible assumption, equally demanding. Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik Andrei Constantinescu and Diana Ghinea and Jakub Sliwinski and Roger Wattenhofer 2024 Is Part Of LIPIcs, Volume 319, 38th International Symposium on Distributed Computing (DISC 2024) InProceedings Text doc-type:ResearchArticle publishedVersion application/pdf doi:10.4230/LIPIcs.DISC.2024.43 urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-212717 https://drops.dagstuhl.de/entities/document/10.4230/LIPIcs.DISC.2024.43 eng https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode