Self-stabilization by window washing
PODC '96 Proceedings of the fifteenth annual ACM symposium on Principles of distributed computing
Greedy distributed optimization of multi-commodity flows
Proceedings of the twenty-sixth annual ACM symposium on Principles of distributed computing
Stateless distributed gradient descent for positive linear programs
STOC '08 Proceedings of the fortieth annual ACM symposium on Theory of computing
Stateless near optimal flow control with poly-logarithmic convergence
LATIN'08 Proceedings of the 8th Latin American conference on Theoretical informatics
| Hi-index | 0.00 |
A communication protocol is stablizing iff starting from any unsafe state (i.e., one that violates the intended invariant of the protocol), the protocol is guaranteed to converge to a safe state within a finite number of state transitions. Stabilization allows the processes in a protocol to reestablish coordination between one another, whenever coordination is lost due to some failure. In this paper, we identify some important characteristics of stabilizing protocols; we show in particular that a stabilizing protocol is nonterminating, has an infinite number of safe states, and has timeout actions. We also propose a formal method for proving protocol stabilization: in order to prove that a given protocol is stabilizing, it is sufficient (and necessary) to exhibit and verify what we call a convergence stair for the protocol. Finally, we discuss how to redesign a number of well-known protocols to make them stabilizing; these include the sliding-window protocol and the two-way handshake.