Self-Stabilization in Unstable Network Environments

A self-stabilizing protocol can achieve its intended behavior regardless of the initial configuration (i.e., global state). Thus, a self-stabilizing protocol has autonomous adaptability to any change of network environments: after the last change occurs, the protocol starts to converge to its intended behavior. This advantage makes self-stabilizing protocols extremely attractive in designing highly dependable distributed systems in unstable network environments. While conventional self-stabilizing protocols require that the network environments should be static during convergence to the intended behaviors, some recent works undertake the challenges of realizing self-stabilization in unstable network environments. This paper briefly introduces some of our challenges in this subject.