Bounding the unbounded [distributed computing protocols]

Many important protocols in distributed computing have simple and elegant solutions if one allows the assumption of unbounded size registers. This assumption can be simulated in practice using sufficiently large but bounded registers; however the resulting protocols are extremely vulnerable to transient faults. The authors present a general methodology for the transformation of unbounded register protocols so that they can work with bounded registers in a self-stabilizing fashion. The applicability of this method is demonstrated with two examples: spanning tree computation and topology update