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M. Hutle, J. Widder:
"Time Free Self-Stabilizing Local Failure Detection";
Report for Research Report 33/2004, Technische Universität Wien, Institut für Technische Informatik, Treitlstraße 3, A-1040 Vienna, Austria; 2004.

It is widely acknowledged that failure detection is a useful building block for reliable distributed systems. Since many applications rely on it, implementations of failure detectors should often be as reliable as possible. In this paper we present a failure detector implementation which tries to reconcile two approaches: Self-stabilization and weak timing models. We introduce two time free self-stabilizing local failure detector implementations. The first handles an unbounded number of messages which may stem from the unstable period, but requires unbounded space. The second, more practical, implementation requires just bounded space while assuming a known upper bound on the number of messages -- a reasonable assumption for many networks.

http://www.vmars.tuwien.ac.at/php/pserver/docdetail.php?DID=1403&viewmode=paper&year=2004