Self-Stabilization: A New Paradigm for Fault Tolerance in Distributed Algorithm Design
Gheorghe Antonoiu, Pradip K. Srimani · 1998
Our purpose in the present paper is to present a brief overview of the relatively new paradigm of self-stabilization to provide fault tolerance in distributed systems. Stabilizing algorithms are optimistic in the sense that the distributed system may temporarily behave inconsistently but a return to correct system behavior is guranteed in finite time while traditional robust distributed algorithms follow a pessimistic approach in that it protects against the worst possible scenario which demands an assumption of the upper bound on the number of faults. 1 Introduction Robustness is one of the most important requirements of modern distributed systems. Different types of faults are likely to occur at various parts of the system. These systems go through the transient states because they are exposed to constant change of their environment. In a distributed system the computing elements or nodes exchange information only by message passing. One of the goals of a distributed system is that...