Self-Stabilization: A New Paradigm for Fault Tolerance in Distributed Algorithm Design

Our purpose in the present paper is to present a brief overview of the relatively new paradigm of self-stabilization to provide fault tolerance in distributed systems. Stabilizing algorithms are optimistic in the sense that the distributed system may temporarily behave inconsistently but a return to correct system behavior is guranteed in finite time while traditional robust distributed algorithms follow a pessimistic approach in that it protects against the worst possible scenario which demands an assumption of the upper bound on the number of faults.