Brief Announcement: On the Time Complexity of Distributed Topological Self-stabilization

This brief announcement proposes a new model to measure the distributed time complexity of topological self-stabilization. In the field of topological selfstabilization, nodes—e.g., machines in a p2p network—seek to establish a certain network structure in a robust manner (see, e.g., [2] for a distributed algorithm for skip graphs). While several complexity models have been proposed and analyzed over the last years, these models are often inappropriate to adequately model parallel efficiency: either they are overly pessimistic in the sense that they can force the algorithm to work serially, or they are too optimistic in the sense that contention issues are neglected. We hope that our approach will inspire researchers in the community to analyze other problems from this perspective. For a complete technical report about our model, related literature and algorithms, the reader is referred to [1].