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U.S. Department of Energy
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Design of fault-tolerant protocols for distributed processing systems

Thesis/Dissertation ·
OSTI ID:6988027

This thesis presents a unified approach to the problem of fault tolerance. The author surveys the methods used in the design of distributed algorithms for solving problems in fault-free networks and observes that computing a tree function of the private values of the processors is common to a large class of algorithms. He makes this paradigm fault-tolerant and consequently converts the existing algorithms into fault-tolerant algorithms. Link failures are considered first. It is shown that it is possible to deal with link failures even when the network is asynchronous. The techniques is then applied to a sample set of problems and fault-tolerant protocols are obtained. The problems considered include system problems, set theoretic problems, and topological problems. For one of the topological problems, namely, constructing shortest paths in fault-free networks, several issues are considered and tight lower and upper bounds are presented. Finally, the case of node failures is considered.

Research Organization:
Pittsburgh Univ., PA (USA)
OSTI ID:
6988027
Country of Publication:
United States
Language:
English