In: Proceedings of the second IEEE International Conference on Systems, Man and Cybernetics (SMC'02), October 6-9, 2002, Hammamet, Tunisia, Volume 3. IEEE Computer Society Press, October 2002.
Abstract: It has been proved that it is not possible to solve the consensus problem in an asynchronous distributed system subject to failures. The abstraction of an unreliable failure detectors has been presented as a way to extend the pure asynchronous model in order to circumvent this impossibility result. In this paper, we present an hierarchical timed coloured Petri net model of a distributed consensus algorithm for an asynchronous distributed system augmented by an unreliable failure detector. By simulating this model, we evaluate the impact of the quality of service of failure detectors on the performance of the consensus protocol.