On the Impact of Fast Failure Detectors on Real-Time Fault-Tolerant Systems

We investigate whether fast failure detectors can be useful — and if so by how much — in the design of real-time fault-tolerant systems. Specifically, we show how fast failure detectors can speed up consensus and fault-tolerant broadcasts, by providing fast algorithms and deriving some matching lower bounds, for synchronous systems with crashes. These results show that a fast failure detector service (implemented using specialized hardware or expedited message delivery) can be an important tool in the design of real-time mission-critical systems.