Self-stabilization in distributed systems - a short survey
Jerzy Brzeziński, Michał Szychowiak · 2000
Self-stabilization is a very interesting and promising research field in computing science. This is due to its guarantees of automatic recovery from any transient failure, without any additional effort. This paper presents an overview of self-stabilizing distributed algorithms. First, the outlook of the self-stabilization paradigm is shown, followed by a simple example and some formal definitions. Then, characteristics of stabilization types are described. Finally, the paper presents several self-stabilizing algorithms and further lines of investigation strive for distributed systems. 1. Introduction One of the most wanted properties of distributed systems is fault tolerance. This can be achieved, in general, by two different approaches: pessimistic and optimistic. In the former, we deal with robust algorithms protected against any possible (i.e. the most pessimistic) or admissible set of failures. In the latter case, we use selfstabilizing algorithms, which after any failure guara...