Granular Synchrony
<|reference_start|>Granular Synchrony: Today's mainstream network timing models for distributed computing are synchrony, partial synchrony, and asynchrony. These models are coarse-grained and often make either too strong or too weak assumptions about the network. This paper introduces a new timing model called granular synchrony that models the network as a mixture of synchronous, partially synchronous, and asynchronous communication links. The new model is not only theoretically interesting but also more representative of real-world networks. It also serves as a unifying framework where current mainstream models are its special cases. We present necessary and sufficient conditions for solving crash and Byzantine fault-tolerant consensus in granular synchrony. Interestingly, consensus among $n$ parties can be achieved against $f \geq n/2$ crash faults or $f \geq n/3$ Byzantine faults without resorting to full synchrony.<|reference_end|>
@article{giridharan2024granular,
    title={Granular Synchrony},
    author={Neil Giridharan, Ittai Abraham, Natacha Crooks, Kartik Nayak, Ling Ren},
    journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2408.12853},
    year={2024},
    archivePrefix={arXiv},
    eprint={2408.12853},
    primaryClass={cs.DC}
}