Topological Self-Stabilization with Name-Passing Process Calculi

Abstract: Topological self-stabilization describes the ability of a distributed system to let the nodes themselves establish a meaningful overlay network. Independent from the initial network topology, the system converges to the desired topology via forwarding, inserting, and deleting links to neighboring nodes. Name-passing process calculi, like the pi-calculus, are a well-known and widely used method to model concurrent and distributed algorithms. The pi-calculus is designed to naturally express processes with a changing link infrastructure, as the communication between processes may carry information that can be used for a change in the linkage between the processes. We redesign a simple local linearization algorithm with asynchronous message-passing that was originally designed for a shared memory model. We use an extended localized pi-calculus, a variant of the pi-calculus, to model the algorithm. Subsequently, we formally prove the self-stabilizing properties closure, weak convergence for every arbitrary initial configuration, and strong convergence for two special cases. In our proofs we utilize rather an assertional reasoning than an action-based style. Furthermore, we describe the challenges in proving (strong) convergence in the general case. Additionally, we give strong arguments for strong convergence, supported by further proven lemmata, and discuss different approaches for a formal proof.