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1. Byzantine Consensus with Local Multicast Channels

   https://doi.org/10.4230/LIPIcs.DISC.2021.26  

   Khan, Muhammad Samir (October 2021, Leibniz international proceedings in informatics)

   Gilbert, Seth (Ed.)

   Byzantine consensus is a classical problem in distributed computing. Each node in a synchronous system starts with a binary input. The goal is to reach agreement in the presence of Byzantine faulty nodes. We consider the setting where communication between nodes is modelled via an undirected communication graph. In the classical point-to-point communication model all messages sent on an edge are private between the two endpoints of the edge. This allows a faulty node to equivocate, i.e., lie differently to its different neighbors. Different models have been proposed in the literature that weaken equivocation. In the local broadcast model, every message transmitted by a node is received identically and correctly by all of its neighbors. In the hypergraph model, every message transmitted by a node on a hyperedge is received identically and correctly by all nodes on the hyperedge. Tight network conditions are known for each of the three cases. We introduce a more general model that encompasses all three of these models. In the local multicast model, each node u has one or more local multicast channels. Each channel consists of multiple neighbors of u in the communication graph. When node u sends a message on a channel, it is received identically by all of its neighbors on the channel. For this model, we identify tight network conditions for consensus. We observe how the local multicast model reduces to each of the three models above under specific conditions. In each of the three cases, we relate our network condition to the corresponding known tight conditions. The local multicast model also encompasses other practical network models of interest that have not been explored previously, as elaborated in the paper. 

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2. Exact Byzantine Consensus on Undirected Graphs under Local Broadcast Model

   https://doi.org/10.1145/3293611.3331619  

   Khan, Muhammad Samir; Naqvi, Syed Shalan; Vaidya, Nitin H. (July 2019, ACM Symposium on Principles in Distributed Computing)

   This paper considers the Byzantine consensus problem for nodes with binary inputs. The nodes are interconnected by a network represented as an undirected graph, and the system is assumed to be synchronous. Under the classical point-to-point communication model, it is well-known that the following two conditions are both necessary and sufficient to achieve Byzantine consensus among n nodes in the presence of up to ƒ Byzantine faulty nodes: n & 3 #8805; 3 ≥ ƒ+ 1 and vertex connectivity at least 2 ƒ + 1. In the classical point-to-point communication model, it is possible for a faulty node to equivocate, i.e., transmit conflicting information to different neighbors. Such equivocation is possible because messages sent by a node to one of its neighbors are not overheard by other neighbors. This paper considers the local broadcast model. In contrast to the point-to-point communication model, in the local broadcast model, messages sent by a node are received identically by all of its neighbors. Thus, under the local broadcast model, attempts by a node to send conflicting information can be detected by its neighbors. Under this model, we show that the following two conditions are both necessary and sufficient for Byzantine consensus: vertex connectivity at least ⌋ 3 fƒ / 2 ⌊ + 1 and minimum node degree at least 2 ƒ. Observe that the local broadcast model results in a lower requirement for connectivity and the number of nodes n, as compared to the point-to-point communication model. We extend the above results to a hybrid model that allows some of the Byzantine faulty nodes to equivocate. The hybrid model bridges the gap between the point-to-point and local broadcast models, and helps to precisely characterize the trade-off between equivocation and network requirements. 

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3. Rank Aggregation from Pairwise Comparisons in the Presence of Adversarial Corruptions

   Agarwal, Arpit; Agarwal, Shivani; Khanna, Sanjeev; Patil, Prathamesh (January 2020, Proceedings of the 37th International Conference on Machine Learning)

   Rank aggregation from pairwise preferences has widespread applications in recommendation systems and information retrieval. Given the enormous economic and societal impact of these applications, and the consequent incentives for malicious players to manipulate ranking outcomes in their favor, an important challenge is to make rank aggregation algorithms robust to adversarial manipulations in data. In this paper, we initiate the study of robustness in rank aggregation under the popular Bradley-Terry-Luce (BTL) model for pairwise comparisons. We consider a setting where pairwise comparisons are initially generated according to a BTL model, but a fraction of these comparisons are corrupted by an adversary prior to being reported to us. We consider a strong contamination model, where an adversary having complete knowledge of the initial truthful data and the underlying true BTL parameters, can subsequently corrupt the truthful data by inserting, deleting, or changing data points. The goal is to estimate the true score/weight of each item under the BTL model, even in the presence of these corruptions. We characterize the extent of adversarial corruption under which the true BTL parameters are uniquely identifiable. We also provide a novel pruning algorithm that provably cleans the data of adversarial corruption under reasonable conditions on data generation and corruption. We corroborate our theory with experiments on both synthetic as well as real data showing that previous algorithms are vulnerable to even small amounts of corruption, whereas our algorithm can clean a reasonably high amount of corruption. 

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4. Asynchronous Local Construction of Bounded-Degree Network Topologies Using Only Neighborhood Information

   Koyuncu, Erdem; Jafarkhani, Hamid (November 2018, IEEE transactions on communications)

   We consider the ad-hoc networks consisting of n wireless nodes that are located on the plane. Any two given nodes are called neighbors if they are located within a certain distance (communication range) from one another. A given node can be directly connected to any one of its neighbors, and picks its connections according to a unique topology control algorithm that is available at every node. Given that each node knows only the indices (unique identification numbers) of its one and two-hop neighbors, we identify an algorithm that preserves connectivity and can operate without the need of any synchronization among nodes. Moreover, the algorithm results in a sparse graph with at most 5n edges and a maximum node degree of 10. Existing algorithms with the same promises further require neighbor distance and/or direction information at each node. We also evaluate the performance of our algorithm for random networks. In this case, our algorithm provides an asymptotically connected network with n(1+o(1)) edges with a degree less than or equal to 6 for 1-o(1) fraction of the nodes. We also introduce another asynchronous connectivity-preserving algorithm that can provide an upper bound as well as a lower bound on node degrees. 

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5. Neighborhood-based bridge node centrality tuple for complex network analysis

   https://doi.org/10.1007/s41109-021-00388-1  

   Meghanathan, Natarajan (December 2021, Applied Network Science)

   Abstract We define a bridge node to be a node whose neighbor nodes are sparsely connected to each other and are likely to be part of different components if the node is removed from the network. We propose a computationally light neighborhood-based bridge node centrality (NBNC) tuple that could be used to identify the bridge nodes of a network as well as rank the nodes in a network on the basis of their topological position to function as bridge nodes. The NBNC tuple for a node is asynchronously computed on the basis of the neighborhood graph of the node that comprises of the neighbors of the node as vertices and the links connecting the neighbors as edges. The NBNC tuple for a node has three entries: the number of components in the neighborhood graph of the node, the algebraic connectivity ratio of the neighborhood graph of the node and the number of neighbors of the node. We analyze a suite of 60 complex real-world networks and evaluate the computational lightness, effectiveness, efficiency/accuracy and uniqueness of the NBNC tuple vis-a-vis the existing bridgeness related centrality metrics and the Louvain community detection algorithm. 

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