Brief Announcement: Robust Self-stabilizing Construction of Bounded Size Weight-Based Clusters

Abstract

The clustering problem consists of partitioning network nodes into groups called clusters. Each cluster has a single clusterhead that acts as local coordinator of cluster.

A technique for designing solutions that tolerate transient faults is selfstabilization. Self-stabilizing protocols are attractive because they need not be initialized: they converge from any configuration to a legitimate one. Also, they are adaptive to topological changes. If the current configuration is inconsistent with the network topology, the self-stabilizing protocol eventually converges to a legitimate configuration. Nevertheless, self-stabilizing protocols do not guarantee any property during the convergence period. In addition, the convergence time may be proportional to the size of the network; particularly, in weight-based clustering protocols. In order to overcome these drawbacks, we are interested to the robust stabilization. Robust stabilization guarantees that from an illegitimate configuration, the system reaches quickly a safe configuration, in which the safety property is satisfied. The safety property has to be defined such that the system performs correctly its task in a safe configuration. During the convergence to a legitimate configuration, the safety property stays always verified.