An Evaluation of Weak State Mechanism Design for Indirection in Dynamic Networks

—State signaling and maintenance mechanisms play crucial roles in communication network protocols. State is used to facilitate indirections in protocols such as routing. Design approaches for traditional state signaling mechanisms have been categorized into soft and hard state. In both approaches, the state is deterministic. Hence, we call both as having strong state semantics, or more crisply, refer to them as strong state. If the state tracks entities with dynamic nature, strong state rapidly becomes invalidated and needs to be refreshed explicitly through control packets. In this paper, we evaluate the recently proposed weak state [1]. Weak state is a generalization of soft state that is characterized by probabilistic semantics and local updates. It is interpreted as a probabilistic hint and not absolute truth. It contains a measure of confidence in the state value, which is a measure of the probability that the state is valid. The confidence or the state semantics is decayed lo...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2009
• Where: INFOCOM
• Authors: Utku Gunay Acer, Alhussein A. Abouzeid, Shivkumar Kalyanaraman
• Keywords: Communications, INFOCOM 2009, Pure Distortion, Strong State, Weak State