A superstabilizing spanning tree protocol for a link failure

A self-stabilizing protocol is a distributed protocol that can eventually solve the problem (reach a legitimate configuration) even when started from an arbitrary initial (global) configuration. These protocols do not make any assumptions about the initial state, and so can tolerate any transient failures that may occur during the execution of the protocol. Superstabilizing protocols offer an even higher degree of fault tolerance over the superior fault tolerance of self-stabilizing protocols. A superstabilizing protocol is a self-stabilizing protocol that has a passage predicate that is guaranteed to be satisfied by all of the network configurations that appear during the execution of the protocol from when a failure occurs in a legitimate configuration until restabilization. This paper proposes a superstabilizing protocol for constructing a spanning tree that is tolerant of any single arbitrary link failure. © 2007 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.