A Stabilizing Deactivation/Reactivation Protocol

Consider a distributed system that delivers a set of services (such as message routing, maintenance of a global invariant, leader election, mutual exclusion, and so forth) to a distributed application. Such a system often provides its services at all times, regardless of whether or not these services are in demand at any given time. This leads to wasteful use of system resources. In this paper, we propose a novel stabilizing protocol for deactivating the system services in the absence of demand and reactivating the services upon demand. The proposed protocol is simple enough. When a process needs a service, it periodically sends messages that reach every other process in the system and causes every process to reactivate the service. For this purpose, only a single-type message carrying no information is sent in the system. When no process needs the service, the sending of messages is stopped, causing every process to deactivate the service. The proposed system has many applications in mobile and sensor networks.