Self-stabilizing end-to-end communication

Self-stabilizing protocols must begin operating correctly even when started from an arbitrary state. The end-to-end problem is to ensure reliable message delivery across an unreliable network under the weakest possible guarantee from the network - that the sender and receiver are never separated by a cut of permanently failed links. In this paper we present the first self-stabilizing end-to-end protocol. Our solution has message complexities comparable with the best known non-stabilizing solutions. Our solution also has good stabilization time complexity: the time for the protocol to stabilize has the same complexity as the time the protocol takes to deliver a message.