A self-stabilizing algorithm for strong fairness

Self-stabilization is a novel technique to deal with faults in distributed systems. This paper presents a distributed self-stabilizing algorithm for implementing strong fairness in an arbitrary network. A desirable feature of this algorithm is that it can be used to enforce the strong fairness property on any distributed algorithm including self-stabilizing algorithms. In addition, the algorithm does not require any initialization and can withstand transient failures. At the end of the paper such issues as improving the time complexity of the proposed algorithm and the limitations on the efficiency of any implementation of strong fairness are discussed.