Self-Stabilizing Wavelets and r-Hops Coordination

We introduce a simple tool called the wavelet (or, r-wavelet) scheme. Wavelets deals with coordination among processes which are at most r hops away of each other. We present a selfstabilizing solution for this scheme. Our solution requires no underlying structure and works in arbritrary anonymous networks, i.e., no process identifier is required. Moreover, our solution works under any (even unfair) daemon. Next, we use the wavelet scheme to design self-stabilizing layer clocks. We show that they provide an efficient device in the design of local coordination problems at distance r, i.e., r-barrier synchronization and r-local resource allocation (LRA) such as r-local mutual exclusion (LME), r-group mutual exclusion (GME), and r-Reader/Writers. Some solutions to the r-LRA problem (e.g., r-LME) also provide transformers to transform algorithms written assuming any r-central daemon into algorithms working with any distributed daemon

Self-Stabilizing Clock Synchronization in Dynamic Networks

We consider the fundamental problem of periodic clock synchronization in a synchronous multi-agent system. Each agent holds a clock with an arbitrary initial value, and clocks must eventually be congruent, modulo some positive integer P. Previous algorithms worked in static networks with drastic connectivity properties and assumed that global informations are available at each node. In this paper, we propose a finite-state algorithm for time-varying topologies that does not require any global knowledge on the network. The only assumption is the existence of some integer D such that any two nodes can communicate in each sequence of D consecutive rounds, which extends the notion of strong connectivity in static network to dynamic communication patterns. The smallest such D is called the dynamic diameter of the network. If an upper bound on the diameter is provided, then our algorithm achieves synchronization within 3D rounds, whatever the value of the upper bound. Otherwise, using an adaptive mechanism, synchronization is achieved with little performance overhead. Our algorithm is parameterized by a function g, which can be tuned to favor either time or space complexity. Then, we explore a further relaxation of the connectivity requirement: our algorithm still works if there exists a positive integer R such that the network is rooted over each sequence of R consecutive rounds, and if eventually the set of roots is stable. In particular, it works in any rooted static network

EFFICIENT COUNTING WITH OPTIMAL RESILIENCE

Consider a complete communication network of n nodes, where the nodes receive a common clock pulse. We study the synchronous c-counting problem: given any starting state and up to f faulty nodes with arbitrary behavior, the task is to eventually have all correct nodes labeling the pulses with increasing values modulo c in agreement. Thus, we are considering algorithms that are self-stabilizing despite Byzantine failures. In this work, we give new algorithms for the synchronous counting problem that (1) are deterministic, (2) have optimal resilience, (3) have a linear stabilization time in f (asymptotically optimal), (4) use a small number of states, and, consequently, (5) communicate a small number of bits per round. Prior algorithms either resort to randomization, use a large number of states and need high communication bandwidth, or have suboptimal resilience. In particular, we achieve an exponential improvement in both state complexity and message size for deterministic algorithms. Moreover, we present two complementary approaches for reducing the number of bits communicated during and after stabilization.Peer reviewe

On the Limits and Practice of Automatically Designing Self-Stabilization

A protocol is said to be self-stabilizing when the distributed system executing it is guaranteed to recover from any fault that does not cause permanent damage. Designing such protocols is hard since they must recover from all possible states, therefore we investigate how feasible it is to synthesize them automatically. We show that synthesizing stabilization on a fixed topology is NP-complete in the number of system states. When a solution is found, we further show that verifying its correctness on a general topology (with any number of processes) is undecidable, even for very simple unidirectional rings. Despite these negative results, we develop an algorithm to synthesize a self-stabilizing protocol given its desired topology, legitimate states, and behavior. By analogy to shadow puppetry, where a puppeteer may design a complex puppet to cast a desired shadow, a protocol may need to be designed in a complex way that does not even resemble its specification. Our shadow/puppet synthesis algorithm addresses this concern and, using a complete backtracking search, has automatically designed 4 new self-stabilizing protocols with minimal process space requirements: 2-state maximal matching on bidirectional rings, 5-state token passing on unidirectional rings, 3-state token passing on bidirectional chains, and 4-state orientation on daisy chains

Synchronous vs. Asynchronous Unison

Abstract. This paper considers the self-stabilizing unison problem. The contribution of this paper is threefold. First, we establish that when any self-stabilizing asynchronous unison protocol runs in synchronous systems, it converges to synchronous unison if the size of the clock K is greater than CG, CG being the length of the maximal cycle of the shortest maximal cycle basis if the graph contains cycles, 2 otherwise (tree networks). The second result demonstrates that the asynchronous unison in [3] provides a universal self-stabilizing synchronous unison for trees which is optimal in memory space. It works with any K ≥ 3, without any extra state, and stabilizes within 2D rounds, where D is the diameter of the network. This protocol gives a positive answer to the question whether there exists or not a universal self-stabilizing synchronous unison for tree networks with a state requirement independant of local or global information of the tree. If K = 3, then the stabilization time of this protocol is equal to D only, i.e., it reaches the optimal performance of [8]. The third result of this paper is a self-stabilizing unison for general synchronous systems. It requires K ≥ 2 only, at least K + D states per process, and its stabilization time is 2D only. This is the best solution for general synchronous systems, both for the state requirement and the stabilization time.