Making Asynchronous Distributed Computations Robust to Noise

Abstract: We consider the problem of making distributed computations robust to noise, in particular to worst-case (adversarial) corruptions of messages. We give a general distributed interactive coding scheme which simulates any asynchronous distributed protocol while tolerating an optimal corruption of a $\Theta(1/n)$ fraction of all messages while incurring a moderate blowup of $O(n\log^2 n)$ in the communication complexity. Our result is the first fully distributed interactive coding scheme in which the topology of the communication network is not known in advance. Prior work required either a coordinating node to be connected to all other nodes in the network or assumed a synchronous network in which all nodes already know the complete topology of the network.