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The instability of self-stabilization

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Summary

We argue that the important property of self-stabilization is, in principle, unstable across system classes. In particular, we first define a very broad notion of simulation. We then define what it means for a simulation to either preserve or force self-stabilization. Given these definitions, we then show that, for a variety of system classes, there is no simulation that preserves or forces self-stabilization.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Sciences, The University of Texas at Austin, 78712, Austin, TX, USA

    Mohamed G. Gouda & Louis E. Rosier

  2. Department of Computing and Information Sciences, Kansas State University, 66506, Manhattan, KS, USA

    Rodney R. Howell

Authors
  1. Mohamed G. Gouda
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  2. Rodney R. Howell
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  3. Louis E. Rosier
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Additional information

This work was supported in part by U.S. Office of Naval Research Grant No. N00014-86-K-0763 and National Science Foundation Grant No. CCR-8711579. Preliminary versions of this work have appeared in the Proceedings of the MCC Workshop on Self-Stabilizing Systems, MCC Technical Report No. STP-379-89, Austin, Texas, August 1989, and under the title “System Simulation and the Sensitivity of Self-Stabilization” in the Proceedings of the 14th International Symposium on Mathematical Foundations of Computer Science, LNCS 379, pp. 249–258, Porabka-Kozubnik, Poland, August–September 1989.

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Gouda, M.G., Howell, R.R. & Rosier, L.E. The instability of self-stabilization. Acta Informatica 27, 697–724 (1990). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00264283

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