Self fault-tolerance of S-W communication protocol

A communication protocol can be said to be self fault-tolerant if starting from any unsafe state (illegal global state), the protocol is guaranteed to reach a safe global state (legal global state) within a finite number of state transitions (or a finite time). This paper investigates the self-fault-tolerance of a sliding-window (S-W) communication protocol. It first describes some concepts and a method for achieving self fault-tolerance of communication protocols. It then investigates the S-W communication protocol that does not satisfy the self-tolerance, and provides a redesign version of this existing protocol using the proposed approach. Finally, it verifies the correctness of the fault-tolerant S-W communication protocol.