Recursive Energy Efficient Agreement
Shachar Meir, David Peleg
TL;DR
This work studies energy-efficient agreement in the synchronous sleeping model, addressing crash and Byzantine faults. It extends recursive techniques to crash faults to attain awake complexity $O(\log f)$ and round complexity $O(f)$, for up to $f<n$ faults, and provides an unauthenticated Graded Byzantine Agreement for $f<n/3$ along with a parallelized optimization achieving the same asymptotics. The approach leverages recursion and a Graded-BA primitive to balance active participation and reliability, yielding practical, energy-conscious protocols for distributed systems. Overall, the paper highlights a trade-off between awake complexity and rounds compared to prior energy-focused results and contributes new energy-efficient constructions for crash and graded Byzantine agreement.
Abstract
Agreement is a foundational problem in distributed computing that have been studied extensively for over four decades. Recently, Meir, Mirault, Peleg and Robinson introduced the notion of \emph{Energy Efficient Agreement}, where the goal is to solve Agreement while minimizing the number of round a party participates in, thereby reducing the energy cost per participant. We show a recursive Agreement algorithm that has $O(\log f)$ active rounds per participant, where $f<n$ represents the maximum number of crash faults in the system.