Optimality of the adaptive leader count

Determine whether the leader count selected by the adaptive leader-count mechanism is optimal under prevailing network conditions.

Background

The adaptive mechanism adjusts the number of leaders using an additive-increase, multiplicative-decrease rule based on the observed direct-decision rate. The paper proves correctness properties and reports that the mechanism matches the best static leader count in its evaluated scenarios, but it does not prove that the selected count is optimal in general. The authors explicitly characterize the chosen leader count as heuristic, leaving its optimality unresolved.

References

The chosen leader count is a heuristic, not proved optimal.

— Barnacle: Adaptive Multi-Leader Scheduling for DAG-Based Consensus  (2609.03978 - Angeli et al., 3 Sep 2026) in Section 4, “What the adaptive mechanism does not guarantee”