Self-Stabilizing Symmetry Breaking in Constant Space

abstract Alain Mayer Yoram Ofeky Rafail Ostrovskyz Moti Yungx We investigate the problem of self-stabilizing round-robin token management scheme on an anonymous bidirectional ring of identical processors, where each processor is an asynchronous probabilistic coin- ipping nite state machine which sends and receives messages. We show that the solution to this problem is equivalent to symmetry breaking i.e., leader election. Requiring only constant-size messages and message-passing model has practical implications: our solution can be implemented in high-speed networks using a universal fast hardware switches i.e., nite state machines of size independent of the size of the network. Our automata-based message-passing model has inherent deadlock possibility i.e., when all processors are waiting for a message which we assume is detected by an external timeout mechanism. Provided that there is no deadlock to begin with, we show how starting from an arbitrary con guration, the system never en...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2002
• Where: SIAMCOMP
• Authors: Alain J. Mayer, Rafail Ostrovsky, Yoram Ofek, Moti Yung
• Keywords: Identical Processors, Message-passing Model, Nite State Machines, SIAMCOMP 2002