Mastering Agreement Problems in Distributed Systems

0 7 4 0 7 4 5 9 / 0 1 / $ 1 0 . 0 0 © 2 0 0 1 I E E E crashing. This problem lends itself to further exploration of fundamental mechanisms and concepts such as time-out, multicast, consensus, and failure detector. We will survey recent theoretical results of studies related to agreement problems and show how system engineers can use this information to gain deeper insight into the challenges they encounter.