Reaching Agreement with Unknown Participants in Mobile Self-Organized Networks in Spite of Process Crashes

We consider the consensus problem in self-organized networks such as MANETs. Consensus offers a means for reliably solving agreement related problems, which in a self-organized setting can help bring enhanced structure and reliability to the highly dynamic and disorganized environment of MANETs. We consider asynchronous networks with reliable communications channels. Neither the identity nor the number of nodes is initially known to the participants. This captures the self-organized nature of the network, where no central authority initializes each process with some context information. In [CSS04], the authors have identified the conditions for which the above problem admits a solution when the processes are correct. The contribution of this paper is to determine the necessary and sufficient conditions for the above problem when processes can crash. These conditions are routing and mobility independent.