A Taxonomy of Daemons in Self-stabilization

TL;DR

This paper provides a comprehensive taxonomy of daemons in self-stabilization, categorizing their characteristics to facilitate comparison and extension of theoretical results in distributed computing.

Contribution

It introduces a unified taxonomy based on four key characteristics, enabling systematic comparison and extension of daemon-related results in self-stabilization literature.

Findings

Four main daemon characteristics: distribution, fairness, boundedness, enabledness.

A naming scheme for easy comparison of daemon classes.

Exact characterization of daemon transformers within the taxonomy.

Abstract

We survey existing scheduling hypotheses made in the literature in self-stabilization, commonly referred to under the notion of daemon. We show that four main characteristics (distribution, fairness, boundedness, and enabledness) are enough to encapsulate the various differences presented in existing work. Our naming scheme makes it easy to compare daemons of particular classes, and to extend existing possibility or impossibility results to new daemons. We further examine existing daemon transformer schemes and provide the exact transformed characteristics of those transformers in our taxonomy.