On the impossibility of group membership

Abstract

We prove that the primary-partition group membership problem cannot be solved in asynchronous systems with crash failures, even if one allows the removal or killing of non-faulty processes that are erroneously suspected to have crashed. 1 Introduction The problem of group membership has been the focus of much theoretical and experimental work on fault-tolerant distributed systems. A group membership protocol manages the formation and maintenance of a set of processes called a group. For example, a group may be a set of processes that are cooperating towards a common task (e.g., the primary and backup servers of a database), a set of processes that share a common interest (e.g., clients that subscribe to a particular newsgroup), or the set of all processes in the system that are currently deemed to be operational. In general, a process may leave a group because it failed, it voluntarily requested to leave, or it is forcibly expelled by other members of the group. Similarly, a proces...

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