Affiliation: | * Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Kuwait University, PO Box 5969, 13060 Safat, Kuwait ? Department of Computer Science, University of Ottawa, Canada ? Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Concordia University, Canada |
Abstract: | This paper assesses the use of Chandy and Lamport's distributed snapshots algorithm (DSA) for stabilizing a communication protocol, a special type of distributed system. We show that when a loss of coordination occurs during the distributed execution of the protocol, DSA is not guaranteed to terminate, and therefore it sometimes fails to obtain a global state or snapshot. We propose some modifications to DSA to solve this problem. Finally, we discuss how, in the case of a loss of coordination, the modified algorithm can be used to stabilize a communication protocol, and we assess the suitability of the global state obtained by DSA as a recovery point to be used later in a backward recovery procedure. |