Summary: Self­Stabilization Over
Unreliable Communication Media
Yehuda Afek \Lambda Geoffrey M. Brown y
Abstract
A self­stabilizing system has the property that it will converge to a desirable state
when started from any state. Most previous researchers assumed that processes in
self­stabilizing systems may communicate through shared variables while those that
studied message passing systems allowed messages with unbounded size. This paper
discusses the development of self­stabilizing systems which communicate through mes­
sage passing, and in which messages may be lost in transit. The systems presented all
use fixed size message headers.
First, a self­stabilizing version of the Alternating Bit Protocol, a fundamental com­
munication protocol for transmitting data across an unreliable communication medium,
is presented.
Secondly, the alternating­bit protocol is used to construct a self­stabilizing token
ring.
1 Introduction
Since the development of the first self­stabilizing systems by Dijkstra in the early 1970's
[Dij73, Dij82] most researchers have considered systems in which the processes communicate
through shared variables [Kru79, Lam84, BGW87, BGW89, BP89]. In this paper we present

Source: Afek, Yehuda - School of Computer Science, Tel Aviv University

Collections: Computer Technologies and Information Sciences