Self-stabilizing virtual synchrony

Paper in proceeding, 2015

Virtual synchrony (VS) is an important abstraction that is proven to be extremely useful when implemented over asynchronous, typically large, message-passing distributed systems. Fault tolerant design is critical for the success of such implementations since large distributed systems can be highly available as long as they do not depend on the full operational status of every system participant. Self-stabilizing systems can tolerate transient faults that drive the system to an arbitrary unpredictable configuration. Such systems automatically regain consistency from any such configuration, and then produce the desired system behavior ensuring it for practically infinite number of successive steps, e.g., 264 steps. We present a new multi-purpose self-stabilizing counter algorithm establishing an efficient practically unbounded counter, that can directly yield a self-stabilizing Multiple-Writer Multiple-Reader (MWMR) register emulation. We use our counter algorithm, together with a selfstabilizing group membership and a self-stabilizing multicast service to devise the first practically stabilizing VS algorithm and a self-stabilizing VS-based emulation of state machine replication (SMR). As we base the SMR implementation on VS, rather than consensus, the system progresses in more extreme asynchronous settings in relation to consensusbased SMR.