On convergence of concurrent systems under regular interactions

Pavithra Prabhakar, Sayan Mitra, Mahesh Viswanathan

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

Abstract

Convergence is often the key liveness property for distributed systems that interact with physical processes. Techniques for proving convergence (asymptotic stability) have been extensively studied by control theorists. In particular, for the asynchronous model of computation Tsitsiklis [8] provides a set of necessary and sufficient conditions for proving stability and convergence under the assumption that each asynchronous operator (state transition function) is applied infinitely often. This paper generalize these results to obtain necessary and sufficient conditions for systems where the infinite sequence of operators is a member of an arbitrary omega regular language. This enables us to apply our theory to distributed systems with changing communication topology, node failures and joins. We illustrate an application of the new set of conditions in verifying the convergence of a simple (continuous) consensus protocol.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publicationCONCUR 2009 - Concurrency Theory - 20th International Conference, CONCUR 2009, Proceedings
Pages527-541
Number of pages15
DOIs
StatePublished - 2009
Event20th International Conference on Concurrency Theory, CONCUR 2009 - Bologna, Italy
Duration: Sep 1 2009Sep 4 2009

Publication series

NameLecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics)
Volume5710 LNCS
ISSN (Print)0302-9743
ISSN (Electronic)1611-3349

Other

Other20th International Conference on Concurrency Theory, CONCUR 2009
Country/TerritoryItaly
CityBologna
Period9/1/099/4/09

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Theoretical Computer Science
  • General Computer Science

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