Circumventing/identifying faults effects

The literature includes a variety of techniques to address the Byzantine Generals Problem or the Byzantine approach. While the main goal within the Byzantine framework is to circumvent and mask the effect of unreliable units (e.g., traitors), much research has been done on identifying (i.e., demasking) unreliable units. This is often called fault identification in system diagnosis. The paper focuses on the identification of unreliable units within the Byzantine framework. Beyond its theoretical interest, an identification of faulty units contributes to accelerating the agreement process itself and drastically reducing the number of messages exchanged between units. The main features of this work are twofold. It does not impose additional assumptions or constraints on the agreement process. It limits the overhead for identifying unreliable units: the identification process is in O(n/sup 3/).