Abortable Consensus and Its Application to Probabilistic Atomic Broadcast

This paper introduces the specification of abortable consensus in message passing systems with prob-abilistic message delivery behaviors to address the tradeoff between progress and agreement in asyn-chronous consensus. The paper presents an abortable consensus algorithm, proves its correctness, andshows how to configure the parameters of the algorithm to satisfy the explicit requirement on the tradeoffbetween progress and requirement. The probabilistic analysis to the algorithm is novel in that it coversall possible failures and asynchrony allowed by the system model rather than some simple case studiesas conducted by most previous researches. The paper further shows how to apply abortable consensusto probabilistic atomic broadcast, and shows that abortable consensus provides stronger properties thanprobabilistic atomic broadcast.