Decentralized consensus protocols with multi-port communication

Abstract

We develop in this paper efficient decentralized consensus protocols for a distributed system with multiport communication. Two classes of decentralized consensus protocols are considered: the one without an initiator and the one with an initiator. We first present the case of 1-port communication, i.e., each node can send out one message in one step, and then derive our results for the case of multi-port communication, i.e., each node can send out more than one message in one step. Given an arbitrary number of nodes in a system, the proposed protocols can reach the consensus in the minimal numbers of message steps. The number of messages incurred by each algorithm is also derived.