Byzantine Fault-Tolerant Consensus in Wireless Ad Hoc Networks

Wireless ad hoc networks, due to their inherent unreliability, pose significant challenges to the task of achieving tight coordination among nodes. The failure of some nodes and momentary breakdown of communications, either of accidental or malicious nature, should not result in the failure of the entire system. This paper presents an asynchronous Byzantine consensus protocol--called Turquois--specifically designed for resource-constrained wireless ad hoc networks. The key to its efficiency is the fact that it tolerates dynamic message omissions, which allows an efficient utilization of the wireless broadcasting medium. The protocol also refrains from computationally expensive public-key cryptographic during its normal operation. The protocol is safe despite the arbitrary failure of $(f