The Time Complexity of Consensus Under Oblivious Message Adversaries

Abstract

We study the problem of solving consensus in synchronous directed dynamic networks, in which communication is controlled by an oblivious message adversary that picks the communication graph to be used in a round from a fixed set of graphs D arbitrarily. In this fundamental model, determining consensus solvability and designing efficient consensus algorithms is surprisingly difficult. Enabled by a decision procedure that is derived from a well-established previous consensus solvability characterization for a given set D, we study, for the first time, the time complexity of solving consensus in this model: We provide both upper and lower bounds for this time complexity, and also relate it to the number of iterations required by the decision procedure. Among other results, we find that reaching consensus under an oblivious message adversary can take exponentially longer than both deciding consensus solvability and broadcasting the input value of some unknown process to all other processes.