Resynch Procedures and a Fail-Safe Network Protocol

In this paper a new class of network synchronization procedures, called Resynch Procedures, is described. A resynch procedure is a mechanism for effectively bringing all nodes of a distributed network to a known state simultaneously, despite arbitrary finite delays between nodes. The procedures presented have the interesting property that no time-outs are required. One use of a resynch procedure is to implement a network protocol that can guarantee that no packets will be lost and no duplicate packets will be inadvertently received, despite arbitrary node and link failures. This appears to be the first demonstration that such fail-safe protocols exist.