Probabilistic Self-Stabilization and Random Walks

A distributed system is said to be probabilistic self-stabilizing, if it eventually converges to legitimate computation with probability 1, starting from any global configuration. Like a self-stabilizing system, a probabilistic self-stabilizing system tolerates any number of transient failures and recovers legitimate computation, but only probabilistically unlike a self-stabilizing system. After introducing the notion of probabilistic self-stabilizing systems, we discuss how to design probabilistic self-stabilizing algorithms.