Self-Stabilization in the Distributed Systems of Finite State Machines

The notion of self-stabilization was first proposed by Dijkstra in 1974 in his classic paper. The paper defines a system as self-stabilizing if, starting at any, possibly illegitimate, state the system can automatically adjust itself to eventually converge to a legitimate state in finite amount of time and once in a legitimate state it will remain so unless it incurs a subsequent transient fault. Dijkstra limited his attention to a ring of finite-state machines and provided its solution for self-stabilization. In the years following his introduction, very few papers were published in this area. Once his proposal was recognized as a milestone in work on fault tolerance, the notion propagated among the researchers rapidly and many researchers in the distributed systems diverted their attention to it. The investigation and use of self-stabilization as an approach to fault-tolerant behavior under a model of transient failures for distributed systems is now undergoing a renaissance. A good number of works pertaining to self-stabilization in the distributed systems were proposed in the yesteryears most of which are very recent. This report surveys all previous works available in the literature of self-stabilizing systems

A self-stabilizing algorithm for 3-edge-connectivity.

The notion of self-stabilization was first proposed by Dijkstra [37, 38].A system is self-stabilizing if, starting at any state, possibly illegitimate, it eventually converges to a legitimate state in finite time. In this thesis, we are proposing a self-stabilizing algorithm for 3-edge-connectivity of an asynchronous distributed model of computation. This is the first ever self-stabilizing algorithm in the literature for detecting the 3-edge-connected components. It is applicable on a depth-first tree of the network. The result is kept in a distributed fashion in the sense that, upon stabilization of the system, each processor knows all other processors that are 3-edge-connected to it. Assuming that the depth-first search algorithm has stabilized, the system with n processors requires O( n2) moves to determine all the 3-edge-connected components in a way such that, for each component, the information is available at one processor only. Stabilization of this phase is followed by another phase of O(n2) moves which, in the legitimate state, lets all other processors detect their respective components. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)Dept. of Computer Science. Paper copy at Leddy Library: Theses & Major Papers - Basement, West Bldg. / Call Number: Thesis2006 .S25. Source: Masters Abstracts International, Volume: 45-01, page: 0364. Thesis (M.Sc.)--University of Windsor (Canada), 2006