Self-Stabilizing Failure Detector Algorithms

This paper revisits the interconnection of self-stabilization and fault-tolerance. Self-stabilizing algorithms are able to recover from arbitrary system states given that from some point in time on, there are no faults. Fault-tolerance, on the other hand, refers to algorithms that cope with systems where a (bounded) part of the system (e.g. at most f out of n processes) may fail permanently. In previous work [16] we considered the interconnection of these two paradigms, i.e., algorithms that recover from arbitrary states despite of permanent faults. We have shown that in certain settings, problems as failure detection cannot be solved. This paper presents ways to circumvent this impossibility result.

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