Summary
Astabilizing system is one which if started at any state is guaranteed to reach a state after which the system cannot deviate from its intended specification. In this paper, we propose a new variation of this notion, called pseudo-stabilization. Apseudo-stabilizing system is one which if started at any state is guaranteed to reach a state after which the system does not deriate from its intended specification. Thus, the difference between the two notions comes down to the difference between “cannot” and “does not” — a difference that hardly matters in many practical situations. As it happens, a number of well-known systems, for example the alternating-bit protocol, are pseudo-stabilizing but not stabilizing. We conclude that one should not try to make any such system stabilizing, especially if stabilization comes at a high price.
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James E. Burns received the B.S. degree in mathematics from the California Institute of Technology, the M.B.I.S. degree from Georgia State University, and the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in information and computer science from the Georgia Institute of Technology. He is currently an Associate Professor in the College of Computing at the Georgia Institute of Technology, having served previously on the faculty at Indiana University. He has broad research in theoretical issues of distributed and parallel computing, especially relating to problems of synchronization and fault tolerance.
Mohamed Gawdat Gouda was born and raised in Egypt. His first bachelor degree was in engineering, and his second was in mathematics. Both degrees are from Cairo University. After his graduation, he moved to Canada where he obtained an MA in mathematics from York University, and a Master and a Ph.D. in computing science from the University of Waterloo. Later, he moved to the United states of America where he worked for the Honeywell Corporate Technology Center for three years. In 1980, he moved to the University of Texas at Austin, and has settled there ever since, except for one summer at Bell Labs, one summer at MCC, and one winter at the Eindhoven Technical University. Gouda currently holds the Mike A. Myer Centennial Professorship in Computing Science at the University of Texas at Austin. Gouda's area of research is distributed and concurrent computing. In this area, he has been working on: abstraction, nondeterminism, atomicity, convergence, stability, formality, correctness, efficiency, scientific elegance, and technical beauty (not necesarily in that order). Gouda was the founding Editor-in-Chief of the journal Distributed Computing, published by Springer-Verlag in 1985. He was the program committee chairman of the 1989 SIGCOMM Conference sponsored by ACM. He was the first program committee chairman for the International Conference on Network Protocols, established by the IEEE Computer Society in 1993. Gouda is an original member of the Austin Tuesday Afternoon Club. In his spare time, he likes to design network protocols and prove them correct for fun.
Raymond E. Miller received his Ph.D. in 1957 from the University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana. He was a Research Staff Member at IBM, Thomas J. Watson Research Center, Yorktown Heights, N.Y., from 1957 until 1980, Director of the School of Information and Computer Science at Georgia Tech from 1980 until 1987, and is currently a professor of computer science at the University of Maryland, College Park and Director of the NASA Center of Excellence in Space Data and Information Sciences at Goddard Space Flight Center. He has written over 90 technical papers in areas of theory of computation, machine organization, parellel computation and communication protocols. He is a Fellow of the IEEE and a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He has been active in the ACM and IEE/CS, and is a Board member of the Computing Research Association. In the IEEE/CS, he is a member of the Board of Governors and the 1991 Vice President for Educational Activities.
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Burns, J.E., Gouda, M.G. & Miller, R.E. Stabilization and pseudo-stabilization. Distrib Comput 7, 35–42 (1993). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02278854
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02278854