One great issue in conceiving and specifying distributed algorithms is the sheer number of models, differing in subtle and often qualitative ways: synchrony, kind of faults, number of faults… In the context of message-passing, one solution is to restrict communication to proceed by round; A great variety of models can then be captured in the Heard-Of model, with predicates on the communication graph at each round. However, this raises another issue: how to characterize a given model by such a predicate? It depends on how to implement rounds in the model. This is straightforward in synchronous models, thanks to the upper bound on communication delay. On the other hand, asynchronous models allow unbounded message delays, which makes the implementation of rounds dependent on the specific message-passing model.

I will present our formalization of this characterization for asynchronous models. Specifically, we introduce Delivered collections: the collection of all messages delivered at each round, whether late or not. Defining predicates on Delivered collections then allows us to capture message-passing models at the same level of abstraction than Heard-Of predicates. The question is then reformulated to: what Heard-Of predicates can be generated by a given Delivered predicate?

I will provide an answer by considering all possible scheduling of deliveries of messages from the Delivered collections and change of rounds for the processes. Strategies of processes then constrain those scheduling by specifying when processes can change rounds; those ensuring no process is ever blocked forever generate a Heard-Of collection per run, that is a Heard-Of predicate. Finally, we use these strategies to nd a characterizing Heard-Of predicate through a dominance relation on strategies: a dominant strategy for a Delivered predicate implements the most constrained Heard-Of predicate possible. This approach oer both the dominant Heard-Of predicates for classical asynchronous models and the existence, for every Delivered predicate, of a strategy dominating large classes of strategies. On the whole, those results confirm the power of this formalization and demonstrate the characterization of asynchronous models through rounds as a worthwhile pursuit.

This is joint work with Aurélie Hurault and Philippe Quéinnec.