Self-Stabilization in Dynamic Networks

Abstract

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.