Modeling and validating the performance of atomic broadcast algorithms in high-latency networks

The performance of consensus and atomic broadcast algorithms using failure detectors is often affected by a trade-off between the number of communication steps and the number of messages needed to reach a decision. In this paper, we model the performance of three consensus and atomic broadcast algorithms using failure detectors in the oft-neglected setting of wide area networks and validate this model by experimentally evaluating the algorithms in several different setups.