Consensus-Free Atomic Broadcast Protocol for Mobile Distributed Systems
Abstract
The atomic broadcast problem, which consists in delivering messages atomically to multiple processes, is critical for maintaining consistency in distributed systems. This paper intro duces a new atomic broadcast protocol for mobile distributed sys tems. Existing consensus-based protocols have drawbacks such as performance dependencies and specific consensus requirements. The proposed protocol addresses these limitations by allowing processes to cooperate through consecutive rounds to agree on the message delivery sequence without additional building blocks. It tolerates crash failures and uses an unreliable failure detector for fault-tolerance. The protocol simplicity is enhanced by the use of the ♢S failure detector to select a decentralized round leader. Performance evaluation carried out by simulation considers message overhead, latency, energy consumption, and additionally examines the impact of the consensus block on the atomic broadcast protocol.
Keywords
Mobile Distributed Systems, Unreliable Failure Detectors, Atomic Broadcast, Consensus, Rotating Coordinator, Blockchain
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.
N. Rebouh and L. Bouallouche - Medjkoune, "Consensus-Free Atomic Broadcast Protocol for Mobile Distributed Systems," in Journal of Communications Software and Systems, vol. 22, no. 2, pp. 163-174, April 2026, doi: https://doi.org/10.24138/jcomss-2025-0177
@article{rebouh2026consensusfree,
author = {Nadjette Rebouh and Louiza Bouallouche - Medjkoune},
title = {Consensus-Free Atomic Broadcast Protocol for Mobile Distributed Systems},
journal = {Journal of Communications Software and Systems},
month = {4},
year = {2026},
volume = {22},
number = {2},
pages = {163--174},
doi = {https://doi.org/10.24138/jcomss-2025-0177},
url = {https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.24138/jcomss-2025-0177}
}