Fault-Tolerant Consensus in Quantum Networks

Abstract

Fault-tolerant consensus is about reaching agreement on some of the input values in a limited time by non-faulty autonomous processes, despite of failures of processes or communication medium. This problem is particularly challenging and costly against an adaptive adversary with full information. Bar-Joseph and Ben-Or (PODC'98) were the first who proved an absolute lower bound $\Omega(\sqrt{n/\log n})$ on expected time complexity of consensus in any classic (i.e., randomized or deterministic) message-passing network with $n$ processes succeeding with probability $1$ against such a strong adaptive adversary crashing processes. Seminal work of Ben-Or and Hassidim (STOC'05) broke the $\Omega(\sqrt{n/\log n})$ barrier for consensus in classic (deterministic and randomized) networks by employing quantum computing. They showed an (expected) constant-time quantum algorithm for a linear number of crashes $t<n/3$. In this paper, we improve upon that seminal work by reducing the number of quantum and communication bits to an arbitrarily small polynomial, and even more, to a polylogarithmic number -- though, the latter in the cost of a slightly larger polylogarithmic time (still exponentially smaller than the time lower bound $\Omega(\sqrt{n/\log n})$ for classic computation).