Two Snap-Stabilizing Point-to-Point Communication Protocols in Message-Switched Networks

A snap-stabilizing protocol, starting from any configuration, always behaves according to its specification. In this paper, the authors present a snap-stabilizing protocol to solve the message forwarding problem in a message-switched network. In this problem, they must manage resources of the system to deliver messages to any processor of the network. In this purpose, they use information given by a routing algorithm. By the context of stabilization (in particular, the system starts in an arbitrary configuration), this information can be corrupted. So, the existence of a snap-stabilizing protocol for the message forwarding problem implies that they can ask the system to begin forwarding messages even if routing information are initially corrupted.