Fault tolerance is one of the main concepts in distributed computing. It has been tackled from different angles, e.g. by building replicated systems that can survive crash failures of individual components, or even systems that can tolerate a minority of arbitrarily malicious ("Byzantine") participants. Self-stabilization, a fault tolerance concept coined by the late Edsger W. Dijkstra in 1973 [1,2], is of a different stamp. A self-stabilizing system must survive arbitrary failures, beyond Byzantine failures, including for instance a total wipe out of volatile memory at all nodes. In other words, the system must self-heal and converge to a correct state even if starting in an arbitrary state, provided that no further faults happen.
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