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Distributed Leader Election Protocols

Paxos is a consensus protocol that enables agreement among distributed processes in a network, even during failures. It involves three key roles: proposers, acceptors, and learners, and requires a quorum for decisions. The protocol ensures fault tolerance, decentralization, and consistency across the system by allowing multiple nodes to agree on a single value.

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Krishanu saha
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6 views

Distributed Leader Election Protocols

Paxos is a consensus protocol that enables agreement among distributed processes in a network, even during failures. It involves three key roles: proposers, acceptors, and learners, and requires a quorum for decisions. The protocol ensures fault tolerance, decentralization, and consistency across the system by allowing multiple nodes to agree on a single value.

Uploaded by

Krishanu saha
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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Distributed Leader

Election
Consensus Protocol: Paxos
Paxos is a consensus protocol designed to
achieve agreement among a group of distributed
processes or nodes in a network, especially in
the presence of failures. It is particularly useful in
distributed systems where it is crucial to ensure
that multiple nodes agree on a single value or
state, despite the potential for some nodes to
fail or become unreachable.
Key Concepts of Paxos
Proposers: Nodes that propose values to be agreed upon. They
initiate the consensus process by suggesting a value.

Acceptors: Nodes that receive proposals and respond to them.


They can accept or reject proposals based on certain rules.

Learners: Nodes that learn the value that has been agreed upon.
They do not participate in the consensus process but are informed
of the outcome.

Quorum: A subset of nodes that must agree on a proposal for it to


be considered accepted. Typically, a majority of acceptors is
required to form a quorum.
Example of Paxos in Action
Consider a distributed system with three nodes (A, B, and C) that
need to agree on a value.
Prepare Phase:
Node A (the proposer) chooses a proposal number n = 1 and
sends Prepare(1) to nodes B and C. Both B and C respond with
Promise(1) because they have not seen any higher proposal
numbers.

Propose Phase:
Node A, having received a majority of promises, decides to
propose the value X and sends Propose(X) to nodes B and C.
Both nodes accept the proposal and send back Accepted(X).

Consensus Achieved:
Since a majority (2 out of 3) of the nodes have accepted the
proposal, the value X is now agreed upon by the system.
Advantages of Paxos
Fault Tolerance: Paxos can tolerate failures of
some nodes as long as a majority is operational.

Decentralization: There is no single point of


failure, as any node can propose a value.

Consistency: Paxos ensures that all nodes


eventually agree on the same value, maintaining
consistency across the distributed system.

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