Encoded Protocols - Overhead Analysis on Elections

Practical distributed systems are typically built under a crash-fault model. Recently, arbitrary faults such as bit flips have been observed surprisingly often [5], and have disrupted large services such as Amazon S3 [2]. We present a framework for building distributed protocols which automatically improves their fault coverage by means of an encoded processing compiler [4]. Although encoded protocols cannot withstand attacks by malicious adversaries, they can tolerate a wide variety of non-malicious arbitrary faults. This preliminary work focuses on leader election, a fundamental primitive in distributed systems. In these protocols, a bit flips can possibly violate liveness and safety properties, for instance, by never electing a leader, or by electing more than one leader at the same time. We implement two election algorithms in our framework and experimentally analyze the transformation’s overhead on CPU utilization and election time.