Self-stabilization preserving compiler

Abstract

Self-stabilization is an elegant approach for designing fault tolerant systems. A system is considered self-stabilizing if, starting in any state, it converges to the desired behavior. Self-stabilizing algorithms were designed for solving fundamental distributed tasks, such as leader election, token circulation and communication network protocols. The algorithms were expressed using guarded commands or pseudo-code. The realization of these algorithms requires the existence of a (selfstabilizing) infrastructure such as a self-stabilizing microprocessor and a self-stabilizing operating system for their execution. Moreover, the high-level description of the algorithms needs to be converted into machine language of the microprocessor. In this article, we present our design for a self-stabilization preserving compiler. The compiler we designed and implemented transforms programs written in a language similar to the abstract state machine (ASM). The compiler preserves the stabilization property of the high level program.

Stability in Software Engineering: Survey of the State-of-the-Art and Research Directions

“…This property ensures that the system autonomously recovers and converges to legitimate behaviour in a finite time after any transient fault [66] [67] [68] [69]. Since Dijkstra's seminal work, recent work by Dolev et al [70] [71] [72] [73] proposed techniques for designing self-stabilising systems and ensuring that the core layers of the system preserve the property. In more details, Dolev and Rajsbaum [70] have introduced the notion of stability for long-lived consensus distributed systems to reflect the sensitivity of the system decisions between consecutive invocations of the consensus algorithm to input changes.…”