Agreement in Epidemic Information Dissemination

Consensus is one of the fundamental problems in multi-agent systems and distributed computing, in which agents or processing nodes are required to reach global agreement on some data value, decision, action, or synchronisation. In the absence of centralised coordination, achieving global consensus is challenging especially in dynamic and large-scale distributed systems with faulty processes. This paper presents a fully decentralised phase transition protocol to achieve global consensus on the convergence of an underlying information dissemination process. The proposed approach is based on Epidemic protocols, which are a randomised communication and computation paradigm and provide excellent scalability and fault-tolerant properties. The experimental analysis is based on simulations of a large-scale information dissemination process and the results show that global agreement can be achieved without deterministic and global communication patterns, such as those based on centralised coordination.