Fair and Reliable Self-stabilizing Communication

We assume a link-register communication model under read/write atomicity, where every process can read from but cannot write into its neighbours’ registers. The paper presents two self-stabilizing protocols for basic fair and reliable link communication primitives. The first primitive guarantees that any process writes a new value in its register(s) only after all its neighbours have read the previous value, whatever the initial scheduling of processes’ actions. The second primitive implements a “weak rendezvous” communication mechanism by using an alternating bit protocol: whenever a process consecutively writes n values (possibly the same ones) in a register, each neighbour is guaranteed to read each value from the register at least once. Both protocols are self-stabilizing and run in asynchronous arbitrary networks. The goal of the paper is in handling each primitive by a separate procedure, which can be used as a “black box” in more involved self-stabilizing protocols.