On the Possibility and the Impossibility of Message-Driven Self-stabilizing Failure Detection

Abstract. This paper considers message-driven self-stabilizing implementations of unreliable failure detectors. We show that it is impossible to give a deterministic implementation using just bounded memory if there is no known upper bound on the number of messages that may be in transit simultaneously. With relaxed assumptions we then introduce two algorithms that solve the problem. We use self-stabilization to show that message-driven and timedriven semantics are different regarding expressiveness: Comparison with work by Beauquier and Kekkonen-Moneta (1997) reveals that the discussed problem has a time-driven solution but cannot have a messagedriven one.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2005
• Where: SSS
• Authors: Martin Hutle, Josef Widder
• Keywords: Known Upper Bound, Message-driven Self-stabilizing Implementations, SSS 2005, Unreliable Failure Detectors