Snap-Stabilization in Message-Passing Systems

TL;DR

This paper investigates the feasibility of snap-stabilization in message-passing systems, demonstrating impossibility results with unbounded channels and proposing protocols for bounded channels in fully-connected networks.

Contribution

It establishes the conditions under which snap-stabilization is possible or impossible and provides three protocols for bounded-capacity channels.

Findings

Snap-stabilization impossible with unbounded channels.

Snap-stabilization feasible with bounded channels.

Three protocols for fully-connected networks.

Abstract

In this paper, we tackle the open problem of snap-stabilization in message-passing systems. Snap-stabilization is a nice approach to design protocols that withstand transient faults. Compared to the well-known self-stabilizing approach, snap-stabilization guarantees that the effect of faults is contained immediately after faults cease to occur. Our contribution is twofold: we show that (1) snap-stabilization is impossible for a wide class of problems if we consider networks with finite yet unbounded channel capacity; (2) snap-stabilization becomes possible in the same setting if we assume bounded-capacity channels. We propose three snap-stabilizing protocols working in fully-connected networks. Our work opens exciting new research perspectives, as it enables the snap-stabilizing paradigm to be implemented in actual networks.