Self-Stabilization in Dynamic Networks

Toshimitsu MASUZAWA  

Publication
IEICE TRANSACTIONS on Information and Systems   Vol.E92-D   No.2   pp.108-115
Publication Date: 2009/02/01
Online ISSN: 1745-1361
DOI: 10.1587/transinf.E92.D.108
Print ISSN: 0916-8532
Type of Manuscript: INVITED PAPER (Special Section on Foundations of Computer Science)
Category: 
Keyword: 
distributed systems,  self-stabilization,  dynamic networks,  dependability,  

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Summary: 
A self-stabilizing protocol is a protocol that achieves its intended behavior regardless of the initial configuration (i.e., global state). Thus, a self-stabilizing protocol is adaptive to any number and any type of topology changes of networks: after the last topology change occurs, the protocol starts to converge to its intended behavior. This advantage makes self-stabilizing protocols extremely attractive for designing highly dependable distributed systems on dynamic networks. While conventional self-stabilizing protocols require that the networks remain static during convergence to the intended behaviors, some recent works undertook the challenge of realizing self-stabilization in dynamic networks with frequent topology changes. This paper introduces some of the challenges as a new direction of research in self-stabilization.