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Unifying stabilization and termination in message-passing systems

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Abstract.

The paper dispels the myth that it is impossible for a message-passing program to be both terminating and stabilizing. We consider a rather general notion of termination: a terminating program eventually stops its execution after the environment ceases to provide input. We identify termination-symmetry to be a necessary condition for a problem to admit a solution with such properties. Our results do confirm that a number of well-known problems (e.g., consensus, leader election) do not allow a terminating and stabilizing solution. On the flip side, they show that other problems such as mutual exclusion and reliable-transmission allow such solutions. We present a message-passing solution to the mutual exclusion problem that is both stabilizing and terminating. We also describe an approach of adding termination to a stabilizing program. To illustrate this approach, we add termination to a stabilizing solution for the reliable transmission problem.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer and Information Science, Ohio State University, OH 43210, Columbus, USA

    Anish Arora

  2. Department of Computer Science, Kent State University, OH 44242, Kent, USA

    Mikhail Nesterenko

Authors
  1. Anish Arora
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  2. Mikhail Nesterenko
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Correspondence to Anish Arora.

Additional information

Published online: 15 November 2004

Anish Arora: Supported in part by DARPA contract OSU-RF #F33615-01-C-1901,NSF grant NSF-CCR-9972368, Ohio State University Fellowship,and 2002-2003,2003-2004 grants from Microsoft Research.

Mikhail Nesterenko: Supported in part by DARPA contract OSU-RF #F33615-01-C-1901 and byNSF CAREER Award 0347485

Some of the results in this paper were presented at the 21st International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems, Mesa, Arizona, April 2001, pp 99-106.

Correspondence to: Mikhail Nesterenko

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Arora, A., Nesterenko, M. Unifying stabilization and termination in message-passing systems. Distrib. Comput. 17, 279–290 (2005). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00446-004-0111-6

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00446-004-0111-6

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