Understanding Self-Stabilization in Distributed Systems, Part I by Sukumar Ghosh, March 1990

A self-stabilizing system is a network of machines, which starts from an arbitrary initial state and always converges to a legitimate configuration in a finite number of steps. Dijkstra, in his 1974 CACM paper, first demonstrated the feasibility of designing self-stabilizing systems. This report analyzes two of his three protocols, and evolves a methodology for designing non-trivial self-stabilizing systems. To demonstrate the feasibility of this methodology, Dijkstra's solutions have been extended to graph topologies. Finally, the importance of self-stabilizing systems have been highlighted with possible potential applications in different areas