Summary
A self-stabilizing program eventually resumes normal behavior even if excution begins in, an abnormal initial state. In this paper, we explore the possibility of extending an arbitrary program into a self-stabilizing one. Our contributions are: (1) a formal definition of the concept of one program being aself-stabilizing extension of another; (2) a characterization of what properties may hold in such extensions; (3) a demonstration of the possibility of mechanically creating such extensions. The computtional model used is that of an asynchronous distributed message-passing system whose communication topology is an arbitrary graph. We contrast the difficulties of self-stabilization in thismodel with those of themore common shared-memory models.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Bouge L, Francez N: A compositional approach to superimposition. Principles of Programming Languages. ACM 1988
Brown GM, Gouda MG, Wu CL: Token systems that selfstabilize. IEEE Trans Comput 38: 845–852 (1989)
Burns J, Pachl J: Uniform self-stabilizing rings. ACM Trans Programm Lang Syst 11: 330–344 (1989)
Chandy KM, Lamport L: Distributed snapshots: determining global states of distributed systems. ACM Trans Comput Syst 3(1): 63–75 (1985)
Dershowitz N, Manna Z: Proving termination with multiset orderings. Commun ACM 22(8): 465–476 (1979)
Dijkstra EW: Self-stabilizing systems in spite of distributed control. Commun ACM 17(11): 643–644 (1974)
Gouda M, Evangelist M: Convergence/response tradeoffs in concurrent systems. Tech Rep TR 88-39, Univesity of Texas at Austin, 1988
Halpern J, Fagin R: Modelling knowledge and action in distributed systems. Distrib Comput 3:159–177 (1989)
Halpern J, Moses Y: Knowledge and common knowledge in a distributed environment. 3rd ACM Symposium on Principles of Distributed Computing, pp 50–61, 1984
Katz S: A superimposition control construct for distributed systems. ACM Trans program Lang Syst 15(2): 337–356 (1993)
Katz S, Perry KJ: Self-stabilizing extensions for message-passing systems. 9th ACM Symposium on Principles of Distributed Computing, pp 91–101, 1990
Lamport L: What good is temporal logic. 9th World Congress, IFIP 1983, pp 657–668
Lamport L: The mutual exclusion problem: Part II — statement and solutions. J ACM 33(2): 327–348 (1984)
Lichtenstein O, Pnueli A, Zuck L: The glory of the past. Conference on Logics of Programs. Lect Notes Comput Sci, vol 193. Springer, Berlin Heidelberg New York 1985, pp 196–218
Pnueli A: The temporal logic of programs. 18th Annual Symptosium on Foundations of Computer Science, IEEE 1977, pp 46–57
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Additional information
Shmuel Katz received his B.A. in Mathematics and Englisch Literature from U.C.L.A., and his M.Sc. and Ph.D. in Computer Science (1976) from the Weizmann Institute in Rechovot, Israel. From 1976 to 1981 he was a research at the IBM Israel Scientific Center. Presently, he is an Associate Professor in the Computer Science Department at the Technion in Haifa, Israel. In 1977–78 he visited for a year at the University of California, Berkeley, and in 1984–85 was at the University of Texas at Austin. He has been a consultant and vistor at the MCC Software Technology Program, and in 1988–89 was a visiting scientist at the IBM Watson Research Center. His research interests include the methodology of programming, specification methods, program verification and semantics, distributed programming, data structure, and programming languages.
Kenneth J. Pery has performed research in the area of distributed computing since obtaining Masters and Doctorate degrees in Computer Science from Cornell Univesity. His current interest is in studying problems of a partical nature in a formal context. He was graduated from Princeton University in 1979 with a B.S.E. degree in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.
The Research of this author was partially supported by Research Grant 120-749 and the Argentinian Research Fund at the Technion
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Katz, S., Perry, K.J. Self-stabilizing extensions for meassage-passing systems. Distrib Comput 7, 17–26 (1993). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02278852
Received:
Accepted:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02278852