Investigation of Consensus Problem over Combined Wired/Wireless Network

Wireless networks have become ubiquitous, making combined wired/wireless network a popular trend of development in nowadays. Therefore, the Consensus problem in combined wired/wireless network is an important topic. Over the past few years, a considerable number of studies have been made on pure wired networks. However, no studies have ever tried to solve the Consensus problem in combined wired/wireless networks. In order to meet the characteristics of combine wired/wireless networks (the limited resources have made the computation ability of mobile processors often weaker than that of stationary processors) and reduce the number of rounds of message exchange required, most of the communications and computation overhead must be fulfilled within by the consensus-servers. Therefore, we introduce a hierarchical concept in our system model. Only consensus-servers need to exchange messages and compute the common value. In this paper, we will investigate the Consensus problem in combined wired/wireless network to enhance fault-tolerance and reliability. Besides, we also prove our protocol is able to tolerate a maximum number of allowable faulty components with minimum rounds of message exchange required.