MULTISKIPGRAPH: A Self-Stabilizing Overlay Network that Maintains Monotonic Searchability

Abstract

Self-stabilizing overlay networks have the advantage of being able to recover from illegal states and faults. However, the majority of these networks cannot give any guarantees on their functionality while the recovery process is going on. We are especially interested in searchability, i.e., the functionality that search messages for a specific node are answered successfully if a node exists in the network. In this paper we investigate overlay networks that ensure the maintenance of monotonic searchability while the self-stabilization is going on. More precisely, once a search message from node u to another node v is successfully delivered, all future search messages from u to v succeed as well. We extend the existing research by focusing on skip graphs and present a solution for two scenarios: (i) the goal topology is a super graph of the perfect skip graph and (ii) the goal topology is exactly the perfect skip graph.