Agreeing on a common value in a distributed system is a problem that lies at the heart of many distributed computing problems and occurs in several flavors. Unfortunately, even modest network dynamics already prohibit solvability of exact consensus, where agents have to decide on a single output value that is within the range of the agents' initial values.

For many problems (distributed control, clock synchronization, load balancing, …) it is however sufficient to asymptotically converge to the same value, or decide on values not too far from each other. We study solvability of these consensus variants in highly dynamic networks, provide time complexity results, and present fast algorithms. We then show how the results on dynamic networks are relevant for classical fault-models, such as asynchronous message passing with crashes.

The talk is on previous and current research with Bernadette Charron-Bost (LIX), Thomas Nowak (LRI), and Manfred Schwarz (ECS, TU Wien).