Self-stabilizing with service guarantee construction of 1-hop weight-based bounded size clusters

This paper makes contributions in two areas. First, we introduce an extended approach of self-stabilization, called self-stabilization with service guarantee. A self-stabilizing system tolerates transient faults: it automatically recovers to a correct behavior after a stabilization period. However, during stabilization periods, no property on the system behavior is guaranteed. A self-stabilizing protocol with service guarantee quickly provides an useful minimal service, and it maintains the minimal service during stabilization despite the occurrence of some disruptions. To illustrate our approach, we propose a clustering protocol (called SG-BSC), that builds 1-hop, bounded size and weight based clusters. SG-BSC protocol is self-stabilizing with service guarantee: it quickly reaches, in 4 rounds, a safe configuration from any arbitrary one. In a safe configuration, the following useful minimal service is provided: “each node belongs to a cluster, each cluster has a leader and a bounded size. All nodes of a cluster are at most at distance 1 of the cluster-head”. The convergence to a legitimate configuration (optimum service) is done in at most 7∗N 2 + 4 rounds, where N is the number of nodes. We prove that any self-stabilizing protocol building weight-based clusters requires O(N) rounds to stabilize. Once the optimum service is reached, any cluster-head has the highest weight in its cluster, and the number of clusters is locally optimal. During the stabilization period, the minimal service is preserved; so, the hierarchical organization stays available throughout the entire network. Simulation results show the interest of self-stabilization with service guarantee compared to self-stabilization.