Call for Papers: Special Issue on Self-Stabilization

The topic of self-stabilizing systems has been receiving growing attention in recent years. The interest in self-stabilization reflects its importance in existing distributed systems. It allows automatic recovery following transient faults and the possibility of starting a distributed system without a global starting signal. In 1974, E. W. Dijkstra published the pioneering paper in this field, presenting self-stabilizing mutual-exclusion protocols. The progress since 1974 proves that the self-stabilization paradigm is also useful in many contexts other than mutual exclusion. Self-stabilization is applicable to many tasks in communication networks and multiprocessor computers. In fact, in some cases existing protocols were designed to be self-stabilizing, without identifying them as such, simply to meet operational requirements. A (short) partial list of the topics that are currently investigated includes topology update, clock synchronization, leader election, graph algorithms, and flow control. In addition, there are interesting proposals to obtain useful practical variants of the paradigm.

The special issue is requesting original papers that contribute significantly to our growing knowledge on self-stabilization, as well as comprehensive surveys of subareas. We hope that the special issue will make the topic accessible to both theoreticians and practitioners, and will stimulate new research on the topic. Thanks to the electronic format, articles will be published in a wait-free manner.

The Chicago Journal of Theoretical Computer Science is a new peer-reviewed scholarly journal in theoretical computer science. Articles are submitted and published in LaTEX source form, using the AMS-LaTEX packages when appropriate, and distributed internationally over the InterNet. Articles are augmented by refereed forward references to improvements and subsequent related work. Readers may obtain articles through ftp, Gopher, and World Wide Web (e.g., using Mosaic). Other widely used network tools will be supported as they arise in the future. The Journal is committed to minimizing publication delays, and to promoting maximum flexibility in the ways that readers use the journal for teaching, research, and scholarship. Readers' license is limited only as required to insure fair attribution to authors and the journal, and to prohibit use in a competing commercial product. More information, including detailed instructions for authors, and LaTEX style files to aid authors and readers, is available through World Wide Web:

• The MIT Press CJTCS Page
• The University of Chicago CJTCS Page

1. Self-stabilizing distributed algorithms, deterministic or randomized
2. Techniques for the design and analysis of self-stabilizing algorithms
3. Impossibility results and lower bounds for self-stabilizing systems
4. Self-stabilizing networks including high-speed and mobile networks
5. Self-stabilizing real-time distributed systems
6. Self-stabilizing synchronization
7. Self-stabilizing algorithms that cope with permanent faults

Guest Editors:

Shlomi Dolev Department of Math and Computer Science Ben-Gurion University Beer-Sheva, 84105, Israel dolev@cs.bgu.ac.il

Jennifer Welch Department of Computer Science Texas A&M University College Station, TX 77843, USA welch@cs.tamu.edu

Last modified: Mon Mar 4 11:15:43 1996