Self-stabilizing SET-constrained delivery broadcast

Paper i proceeding, 2020

Fault-tolerant distributed applications require communication abstractions with provable guarantees on message deliveries. For example, Set-Constrained Delivery Broadcast (SCD-broadcast) is a communication abstraction for broadcasting messages in a manner that, if a process delivers a set of messages that includes m and later delivers a set of messages that includes m, no process delivers first a set of messages that includes m and later a set of messages that includes m. Imbs et al. proposed this communication abstraction and its first implementation. They have demonstrated that SCD-broadcast has the computational power of read/write registers and allows for an easy building of distributed objects such as snapshot objects and consistent counters. Imbs et al. focused on fault-tolerant implementations for asynchronous message-passing systems that are prone to process crashes. This paper aims to design an even more robust SCD-broadcast communication abstraction, namely a self-stabilizing SCD-broadcast. In addition to process and communication failures, self-stabilizing algorithms can recover after the occurrence of arbitrary transient faults; these faults represent any violation of the assumptions according to which the system was designed to operate (as long as the algorithm code stays intact). This work proposes the first self-stabilizing SCD-broadcast algorithm for asynchronous message-passing systems that are prone to process crash failures. The proposed self-stabilizing SCD-broadcast algorithm has an O(1) stabilization time (in terms of asynchronous cycles). The communication costs of our algorithm are similar to the ones of the non-self-stabilizing state-of-the-art. The main differences are that our proposal considers repeated gossiping of O(1) bits messages and deals with bounded space (which is a prerequisite for self-stabilization). We advance the state-of-the-art also by two new self-stabilizing applications: an atomic construction of snapshot objects and sequentially consistent counters.