Connectivity requirements for Byzantine agreement under restricted types of failures

We investigate the problem of reaching Byzantine Agreement in arbitrary networks where both processors and communication links are subject to omission or stopping faults. For the case of deterministic, synchronous algorithms we give a necessary and sufficient condition relating the solvability of the problem to the connectivity of the network. In particular, we show that an algorithm resilient to at mostt faulty processors andk faulty links subject to omission or stopping faults exist, if and only if the network has a connectivity pair (t, k)>(t, k).Vassos Hadzilacos received his BSE from Princeton in 1980 and his PhD from Harvard in 1984, both in Computer Science. He is presently an Assistant Professor at University of Toronto. His research interests are synchronisation and reliability in distributed computing. He is a co-author of a book on Concurrency Control and Reliability in Database Systems.