Early History of Self-Stabilization Research.
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Early history of Self-Stabilization research.
One very good source for a perspective of the research in self-stabilization
until 1992 is the survey on Self-Stabilization by Marco Schneider
(Of UT at Austin) in
the March 1993 issue of ACM
Computing Surveys. Another survey is available as a
University of IOWA
technical report written by Sukumar Ghosh. A third survey is available in
"Readings in Distributed Computing Systems"( IEEE Computer Society press.).
This survey is written
by M.Flatebo, A.K Datta and Sukumar Ghosh.
From the surveys it is clear that the importance of self-stabilization as a uniform approach to fault tolerance was not conceived widely until 1983. Till 1983 one can find only three papers on the topic other than Dijkstra's papers.
These papers are the followings:
Papers on the topic before 1983.
Kruijer,H.S.M. 1979. Self-stabilization in tree structured systems.
Inf. Process.Lett., 8,2,2-79.
Tchuente,M. 1981. Sur l'autostabilisation dans un reseau dordinateurs. RAIRO Inf. Theor. 15, 47-66. In French.
Whitby-Strevens,C. 1979. On the performance of Dijkstra's self-stabilizing algorithms in spite of distributed control. In proceedings of the first International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems. IEEE, NY.
In 1983 (quoting from Marco Schneider's survey) as a key note speaker at
PODC'83 Leslie Lamport pointed out the importance of Self-Stabilization as
a uniform approach to fault tolerance.
Refering to the 1974 paper of Dijkstra he said
I regard it to be a milestone work in fault tolerance. The terms
"fault-tolerance" and "reliability" never appear in this paper.
After this in 1986 Lamport's two part paper on Mutual Exclusion problem
in the JACM is another landmark in the literature on Self-Stabilization.
Here he characterized the fault models in Distributed Computing and
Self-Stability was a viewed as a robust approach in the face of transient
fault. His algorithm for self-stabilizing mutual exclusion is probably the
first one which has fine grain
atomicity. However, as far
as I know the upsurge in the self-stabilization research did not start until 1988-89.