Simple Majority Consensus in Networks with Unreliable Communication

Abstract: In this work, we analyze the performance of a simple majority-rule protocol solving a fundamental coordination problem in distributed systems - \emph{binary majority consensus}, in the presence of probabilistic message loss. Using probabilistic analysis for a large scale, fully-connected, network of $2n$ agents, we prove that the Simple Majority Protocol (SMP) reaches consensus in only three communication rounds with probability approaching $1$ as $n$ grows to infinity. Moreover, if the difference between the numbers of agents that hold different opinions grows at a rate of $\sqrt{n}$, then the SMP with only two communication rounds attains consensus on the majority opinion of the network, and if this difference grows faster than $\sqrt{n}$, then the SMP reaches consensus on the majority opinion of the network in a single round, with probability converging to $1$ exponentially fast as $n \rightarrow \infty$. We also provide some converse results, showing that these requirements are not only sufficient, but also necessary.