Practically-self-stabilizing virtual synchrony

Abstract

The virtual synchrony abstraction was proven to be extremely useful for asynchronous, large-scale, message-passing distributed systems. Self-stabilizing systems can automatically regain consistency after the occurrence of transient faults. We present the first practically-self-stabilizing virtual synchrony algorithm that uses a new counter algorithm that establishes an efficient practically unbounded counter, which in turn can be directly used for emulating a self-stabilizing Multiple-Writer Multiple-Reader (MWMR). Other self-stabilizing services include membership, multicast, and replicated state machine (RSM) emulation. As we base the latter on virtual synchrony, rather than consensus, the system can progress in more extreme asynchronous executions than consensus-based RSM emulations.