Self-Stabilizing Ring Networks on Connected Graphs

Large networks require scalable routing. Traditionally, protocol overhead is reduced by introducing a hierarchy. This requires aggregation of nearby nodes under a common address prefix. In fixed networks, this is achieved administratively, whereas in wireless ad-hoc networks, dynamic assignments of nodes to aggregation units are required. As a result of the nodes commonly being assigned a random network address, the majority of proposed ad-hoc routing protocols discovers routes between end nodes by flooding, thus limiting the network size. Peer-to-peer (P2P) overlay networks offer scalable routing solutions by employing virtualized address spaces, yet assume an underlying routing protocol for end-to-end connectivity. We investigate a cross-layer approach to P2P routing, where the virtual address space is implemented with a network-layer routing protocol by itself. The Iterative Successor Pointer Rewiring Protocol (ISPRP) efficiently initializes a ring-structured network among nodes having but link-layer connectivity. It is fully self-organizing and issues only a small per-node amount of messages by keeping interactions between nodes as local as possible. The main contribution of this paper is a proof that ISPRP is self-stabilizing, that is, starting from an arbitrary initial state, the protocol lets the network converge into a correct state within a bounded amount of time