Dr. Ali Ebnenasir has been awarded $254,015.00 from the NSF (National Science Foundation) in support of his research. This research focuses on facilitating the design of Self-Stabilizing network protocols, where a SS protocol eventually recovers from any troubled configuration to a legitimate configuration and stays in legitimate configurations as long as there are no perturbations.
This is an important problem as today’s complex distributed systems frequently reach illegitimate configurations due to the occurrence of the transient faults that perturb protocols without causing permanent damage. Most existing methods are based on the manual creation of an initial design and after-the-fact verification of the manual design. This research presents a paradigm shift based on a philosophy of synthesize-in-small-scale-and-generalize.
Dr. Ebnenasir and his students study the automatic generation of small instances of SS protocol, and the generalization of the synthesized instances to larger protocols. This project will fund one PhD student and two hourly-paid undergraduate students, and is expected to take three years.