A Stabilizing Rendition of MST Construction.

T Herman:

Postscript Document and DVI file.


Abstract

A self-stabilizing construction of the minimum-spanning forest of distributed network is described. The algorithm demonstrates that techniques of graph reduction and iteration can be employed in the context of stabilizing distributed programs. The program development follows the principle of layering in the construction of self-stabilizing algorithms, where each layer corresponds to one level of iteration. The result is a relatively terminating program that can either be executed asynchronously or by using a stabilizing synchronizer.