Efficient Fault-Tolerant Consensus for Collaborative Services in Edge Computing

In many edge computing applications, edge devices are required to reach fault-tolerant consensus in order to provide collaborative services in outdoor environments. In this paper, we study a comprehensive (a, b)-majority consensus problem based on a novel failure model, which takes a distinct opinions as inputs and outputs a b-majority opinion as the final agreement. This problem formulation is drastically different from traditional ones, which usually require a majority consensus from the binary opinions of multiple supporters. It is more practical and flexible as it can accommodate more than 2 input opinions and output one that satisfies the application requirement defined by parameter b. We also consider physical layer in our failure model while previous models mainly focus on faults occurred in protocol layer and data layer. Based on this more realistic failure model and a more practical consensus problem definition, we present a distributed protocol for n edge devices to reach an (a, b)-majority consensus within T(n) time steps with high probability. Empirical results from our simulation studies validate the fault tolerance property and efficiency of our work in achieving the (a, b)-majority consensus.

Automated summary

In this study, a novel (a, b)-majority consensus problem based on a new failure model is investigated for fault-tolerant collaborative services in outdoor edge computing applications. A distributed protocol is presented to achieve (a, b)-majority consensus within a defined time frame, considering both physical and protocol layer failures. Empirical results from simulations validate the fault tolerance and efficiency of the proposed approach.