Evaluating Fault Tolerance Properties of Self-stabilizing Matching Algorithms in Wireless Sensor Networks

Self stabilization is an important paradigm for the autonomous recovery of a distributed system from transient failures such as energy depletion of nodes and disrupted connections. It has been used in wireless sensor networks (WSN) as these networks are expected to automatically recover from a transient fault without human intervention. Graph matching is fundamental a graph theory problem which has a broad application range in WSNs and it has been studied extensively in self-stabilizing settings. In this work, we build a simulation model and perform tests to evaluate the fault tolerance properties of self-stabilizing matching algorithms. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first practical evaluation of these algorithms. Considering WSNs, we assume distributed fair and synchronous schedulers. Simulation results have shown that there is a tradeoff between stabilization time of algorithms and the quality of their results. The improvement algorithms which has better lower bounds give better matchings at the cost of longer durations of instability.