Multicoordinated Agreement Protocols for Higher Availabilty

Adaptability and graceful degradation are important features in distributed systems. Yet, consensus and other agreement protocols, basic building blocks of reliable distributed systems, lack these features and must perform expensive reconfiguration even in face of single failures. In this paper we describe multicoordinated mode of execution for agreement protocols that has improved availability and tolerates failures in a graceful manner. We exemplify our approach by presenting a Generic Broadcast algorithm. Our protocol can adapt to environment changes by switching to different execution modes. Finally, we show how our algorithm can solve the Generalized Consensus and its many instances (e.g., consensus and atomic broadcast).