The Taub Faculty of Computer Science Events and Talks

I'll present our paper about the role that null messages play in synchronous systems with and without failures. Our work provides necessary and sufficient conditions on the structure of protocols for information transfer and coordination there. We start by introducing a new and more refined definition of null messages. A generalization of message chains that allow these null messages is provided and is shown to be necessary and sufficient for information transfer in reliable systems. Coping with crash failures requires a much richer structure, since not receiving a message may be the result of the sender’s failure. We introduce a class of communication patterns called resilient message blocks, which impose a stricter condition on protocols than the silent choirs of Goren and Moses (2020). Our paper has been published at DISC 2023.