Easy impossibility proofs for distributed consensus problems (Q1079947)

Easy proofs are given, of the impossibility of solving several consensus problems (Byzantine agreement, weak agreement, Byzantine firing squad, approximate agreement and clock synchronization) in certain communication graphs. It is shown that, in the presence of m faults, no solution to these problems exists for communication graphs with fewer than \(3m+1\) nodes or less than \(2m+1\) connectivity. While some of these results had previously been proved, the new proofs are much simpler, provide considerably more insight, apply to more general models of computation, and (particularly in the case of clock synchronization) significantly strengthen the results.