Impossibility Results for Distributed Computing

To understand the power of distributed systems, it is necessary to understand their inherent limitations: what problems cannot be solved in particular systems, or without sufficient resources (such as time or space). This book presents key techniques for proving such impossibility results and applies them to a variety of different problems in a variety of different system models. Insights gained from these results are highlighted, aspects of a problem that make it difficult are isolated, features of an architecture that make it inadequate for solving certain problems efficiently are identified, and different system models are compared.

Acknowledgments.- Introduction.- Indistinguishability.- Shifting and Scaling.- Scenario Arguments.- Information Theory Arguments.- Covering Arguments.- Valency Arguments.- Combinatorial Arguments.- Reductions and Simulations.- Bibliography.- Authors' Biographies.

Hagit Attiya is a Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the Technion–Israel Institute of Technology. She received her Ph.D. from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 1987 and was a post-doctoral research associate at the Laboratory for Computer Science at MIT until 1990. Her research spans various topics of distributed computing and she is particu larly interested in how the theoretical principles affect the design of distributed and concurrent systems. She co-authored the book Distributed Computing: Fundamentals, Simulations, and Ad vanced Topics, published by Wiley. In 1997, Hagit served as the chair of the program committee for PODC, and she is currently the editor-in-chief of the journal Distributed Computing. Faith Ellen is a Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Toronto. She received her Ph.D. from the University of California at Berkeley in 1986 and was an Assis tant Professor in the Computer Science Department at the University of Washington in Seattle from 1983 to 1986. Her research spans the theory of distributed computing, complexity theory, and data structures and she is primarily interested in understanding how parameters of various models affect their computational power. Faith was the vice-chair of SIGACT from 1997 to 2001 and the chair of the steering committee for PODC from 2006 to 2009. In 2003, she served as the chair of the program committee for DISC