Instruct: Identify the main and secondary category of Arxiv papers based on the titles and abstracts
Query: Consensus with an Abstract MAC Layer   In this paper, we study distributed consensus in the radio network setting.
We produce new upper and lower bounds for this problem in an abstract MAC layer
model that captures the key guarantees provided by most wireless MAC layers. In
more detail, we first generalize the well-known impossibility of deterministic
consensus with a single crash failure [FLP 1895] from the asynchronous message
passing model to our wireless setting. Proceeding under the assumption of no
faults, we then investigate the amount of network knowledge required to solve
consensus in our model---an important question given that these networks are
often deployed in an ad hoc manner. We prove consensus is impossible without
unique ids or without knowledge of network size (in multihop topologies). We
also prove a lower bound on optimal time complexity. We then match these lower
bounds with a pair of new deterministic consensus algorithms---one for single
hop topologies and one for multihop topologies---providing a comprehensive
characterization of the consensus problem in the wireless setting. From a
theoretical perspective, our results shed new insight into the role of network
information and the power of MAC layer abstractions in solving distributed
consensus. From a practical perspective, given the level of abstraction used by
our model, our upper bounds can be easily implemented in real wireless devices
on existing MAC layers while preserving their correctness
guarantees---facilitating the development of wireless distributed systems.

31
The categories of this paper are: ao-sci
15
The categories of this paper are: nucl-ex
22
The categories of this paper are: chao-dyn
37
The categories of this paper are: supr-con
14
The categories of this paper are: math-ph
0
The categories of this paper are: hep-ph
34
The categories of this paper are: chem-ph
33
The categories of this paper are: plasm-ph
21
The categories of this paper are: adap-org
24
The categories of this paper are: dg-ga
30
The categories of this paper are: q-alg
11
The categories of this paper are: hep-lat
36
The categories of this paper are: cmp-lg
4
The categories of this paper are: cond-mat
32
The categories of this paper are: atom-ph
29
The categories of this paper are: funct-an