Silence Is Golden: Self-stabilizing Protocols Communication-Efficient after Convergence

Motivation

Self-stabilization is a general paradigm to provide forward recovery capabilities to distributed systems. A self-stabilizing protocol can eventually recover its intended behavior even when starting from an arbitrary initial configuration, and thus, it has high adaptability to transient faults (e.g., process state corruptions and message corruptions) and network topology changes. The high adaptability is usually acquired at the cost of efficiency. A crucial difference in cost between self-stabilizing and non-self-stabilizing protocols lies in the cost of communication after reaching a desired configuration. It is quite evident for static problems, e.g., spanning-tree construction. Self-stabilizing protocols cannot allow any process to terminate its communication even after converging to a desired configuration (where a solution of the problem is already obtained), while non-self-stabilizing ones can eventually allow every process to terminate all the activity.