Section: Application Domains

Security and Reliability of Network Control Protocols

The main application domain for self-stabilizing and secure algorithms is LSDS where correct behaviours must be recovered within finite time. Typically, in a LSDS (such as a high performance computing system), a protocol is used to control the system, submit requests, retrieve results, and ensure that calculus is carried out accordingly to its specification. Yet, since the scale of the system is large, it is likely that nodes fail while the application is executing. While nodes that actually perform the calculus can fail unpredictably, a self-stabilizing and secure control protocol ensures that a user submitting a request will obtain the corresponding result within (presumably small) finite time. Examples of LSDS where self-stabilizing and secure algorithms are used, include global computing platforms, or peer to peer file sharing systems. Another application domain is routing protocols, which are used to carry out information between nodes that are not directly connected. Routing should be understood here in its most general acceptance, e.g. at the network level (Internet routing) or at the application level (on virtual topologies that are built on top of regular topologies in peer to peer systems). Since the topology (actual or virtual) evolves quickly through time, self-stabilization ensures that the routing protocol eventually provides accurate information. However, for the protocol to be useful, it is necessary that it provides extra guarantees either on the stabilization time (to recover quickly from failures) or on the routing time of messages sent when many faults occur. Finally, additional applications can be found in distributed systems that are composed of many autonomous agents that are able to communicate only to a limited set of nodes (due to geographical or power consumption constraints), and whose environment is evolving rapidly. Examples of such systems are wireless sensor networks (that are typically large of 10000+ nodes), mobile autonomous robots, etc. It is completely unrealistic to use centralized control on such networks because they are intrinsically distributed; still strong coordination is required to provide efficient use of resources (bandwidth, battery, etc).