Fault-tolerance and self-stabilization: impossibility results and solutions using self-stabilizing failure detectors

Abstract

Abstract This paper focuses on protocols that are simultaneously resilient to permanent failures (crash faults) and transient failures (memory and message corruption). First, we show that asynchronous round-based and fault-tolerant protocols cannot be transformed into protocols that are simultaneously fault-tolerant and self-stabilizing (ftss), as is otherwise possible in the synchronous mode of computation. Secondly, we show that it is impossible to find the number of processes (i.e. the size) on a family of networks, as it has been proven for the ring network. Finally, we present a ftss protocol for solving ring size by assuming that each process accesses a failure detector. We also propose two self-stabilizing implementations for the failure detector that differ in their degree of tolerance to transient failures.