Self-Stabilizing Systems

By Sukumar Ghosh & Ted Herman
Series: International Informatics Series
Publisher: McGill-Queen's University Press
Ebook (PDF) : 9780773591141, 228 pages, August 1997

Description

Self- governing control is a defining characteristic of autonomous computing machinery. Autonomy implies some degree of independence, and when a system's ability to achieve its mission is independent of how it is initialized, the system is self-stabilizing. Application of self-stabilization to system and network components is motivated by core concerns of fault-tolerance in distributed systems. Self-stabilization is a solution to problems of transient memory faults and systems with dynamic reconfigurations. Research in self-stabilization explores many of the classic themes of distributed computing (distributed graph algorithms, mutual exclusion, distributed agreement). Recent papers combine self-stabilization with traditional forms of fault-tolerance, consider methodological issues for the design of self-stabilizing systems, investigate randomized techniques, and apply stabilization to new networking models. The workshop brings together concerns from theory and practice of self-stabilization.