Felix C. Gärtner: Specifications for fault tolerance:
A comedy of failures.
Technical Report TUD-BS-1998-03, Department of Computer Science,
Darmstadt University of Technology, Darmstadt, Germany, October 1998.
Abstract
A substantial difficulty in rigorously reasoning about fault
tolerant distributed algorithms is the necessity to formally
describe faulty behavior. In this paper, we present a unified and
formal approach to specify such behavior. It is based on the
observation that faulty behavior can be regarded as a special form
of (programmable) system behavior. Consequently, a failure model is
defined to be a program transformation which can be used to evaluate
the correctness properties of fault tolerant algorithms. We
re-formulate several failure models which are pervasive in the
literature in terms of our approach and show some interesting
relations between them. In order to show the feasibility of this
approach, we apply our methodology to the problem of reliable
broadcast.
Available as gnuzipped Postscript file.
Felix Gärtner (felix@informatik.tu-darmstadt.de)