Space-efficient fault-containment in dynamic networks

Abstract

Bounding the impact of transient small-scale faults by self-stabilizing protocols has been pursued with independent objectives: Optimizing the system's reaction upon topological changes (e.g. super-stabilization), and reducing system recovery time from memory corruptions (e.g. fault-containment). Even though transformations adding either super-stabilization or fault-containment to existing protocols exist, none of them preserves the other. This paper makes a first attempt to combine both objectives. We provide a transformation adding fault-containment to silent self-stabilizing protocols while simultaneously preserving the property of self-stabilization and the protocol's behavior in face of topological changes. In particular, the protocol's response to a topology change remains unchanged even if a memory corruption occurs in parallel to the topology change. The presented transformation increases the memory footprint only by a factor of 4 and adds O(1) bits per edge. All previously known transformations for fault-containing self-stabilization increase the memory footprint by a factor of 2m/n. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.