Trade-offs in fault-containing self-stabilization

Abstract

The construction of protocols that offer users a multitude of choices for fault-containment time, stabilization time, communication complexity and the number of failures that can be tightly contained is demonstrated by changing the value of certain program parameters. The parameters may be chosen by the user depending on the fault-history of the system. For illustration of the ideas, Dijkstra's K-state mutual exclusion protocol is used.