Self-stabilization over unreliable communication media

A self-stabilizing system has the property that it will converge to a desirable state when started from any state. Most previous researchers assumed that processes in self-stabilizing systems may communicate through shared variables while those that studied meassage passing systems allowed messages with unbounded size. This paper discusses the development of self-stabilizing systems which communicate through message passing, and in which messages may be lost in transit. The systems presented all use fixed size message headers. First, a selfstabilizing version of the Alternating Bit Protocol, a fundamental communication protocol for transmitting data across an unreliable communication medium, is presented. Secondly, the alternating-bit protocol is used to construct a self-stabilizing token ring.