Special Issue on Self-Stabilizing Distributed Systems

✍ Scribed by Sajal K. Das; Ajoy K. Datta; Vincent Villain

• Publisher: Elsevier Science
• Year: 2002
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 70 KB
• Volume: 62
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0743-7315
• DOI: 10.1006/jpdc.2001.1835

✦ Synopsis

The feasibility of distributed computing is well proven by the tremendous success of distributed systems in the past two decades. However, advantages of distributed systems and computer networks do not come for free. The design of such systems is quite complex, in part due to unpredictable faults and dynamic changes. In the last 20 years or so, the self-stabilization community took up the challenge of solving the non-trivial problems of dealing with transient faults and dynamic changes. Numerous innovative techniques demonstrated that it is now possible to design fault-tolerant distributed systems using the paradigm of self-stabilization. A selfstabilizing system, regardless of its initial, possibly incorrect state, is guaranteed to behave normally in finite time. The concept of self-stabilization (introduced by Dijkstra in 1974) is a non-traditional approach, and in fact the most general approach to dealing with transient faults.

The self-stabilization area is still young and is one of the very active topics of research in recent years.