Distributed program checking: a paradigm for building self-stabilizing distributed protocols

The notion of distributed program checking as a means of making a distributed algorithm self-stabilizing is explored. A compiler that converts a deterministic synchronous protocol pi for static networks into a self-stabilizing version of pi for dynamic networks is described. If T/sub pi / is the time complexity of pi and D is a bound on the diameter of the final network, the compiled version of pi stabilizes in time O(D+T/sub pi /) and has the same space complexity as pi . The general method achieves efficient results for many specific noninteractive tasks. For instance, solutions for the shortest paths and spanning tree problems take O(D) to stabilize, an improvement over the previous best time of O(D/sup 2/).<>