Using Omissive Faults to Obtain Local Convergence in Partially Connected Networks

Approximate Agreement is an important issue in faulttolerant distributed computing where non-faulty processes exchange and vote upon their local values, to arrive at values which are within the range of the initial values of the nonfaulty processes and within a predefined tolerance of each other. Results to date in Approximate Agreement, however, are not capable of exploiting omission faults. Omission faults are presumed not to occur or a predefined default value is substituted for those values not received, or they are globally discarded before the voting algorithm executes. As a result, hybrid fault models can not differentiate between omissive and transmissive faults