The Taub Faculty of Computer Science Events and Talks

A self-stabilizing algorithm is a distributed algorithm that converges to a legal solution from any initial configuration. Most self-stabilizing protocols rely on checking every neighbor of every processor continuously to detect inconsitencies. Such protocols have a high communication cost, especially in dense networks. We investigate the potential usefulness of gossip for improving the communication efficiency of self-stabilizing protocols. We present randomized low communication self-stabilizing algorithms for several major tasks, namely, spanning tree construction, distributed reset, and unison. The talk is self contained and requires basic knowledge of probability and distributed algorithms.