Reaching Fault Diagnosis Agreement under a Hybrid Fault Model

Abstract

The goal of the fault diagnosis agreement (FDA) problem is to make each fault-free processor detect/locate a common set of faulty processors. The problem is examined on processors with mixed fault model (also referred to as hybrid fault model). An evidence-based fault diagnosis protocol is proposed to solve the FDA problem. The proposed protocol first collects the messages which have accumulated in the Byzantine agreement protocol as the evidence. By examining the collected evidence, a fault-free processor can detect/locate which processor is faulty. Then, the network can be reconfigured by removing the detected faulty processors and the links connected to these processors from the network. The proposed protocol can detect/locate the maximum number of faulty processors to solve the FDA problem.