A failure detector for wireless networks with unknown membership

The distributed computing scenario is rapidly evolving for integrating self-organizing and dynamic wireless networks. Unreliable failure detectors are classical mechanisms which provide information about process failures and can help systems to cope with the high dynamism of these networks. A number of failure detection algorithms has been proposed so far; nonetheless, most of them assume a global knowledge about the membership as well as a fully communication connectivity; additionally, they are timer-based, requiring that eventually some bound on the message transmission will hold. These assumptions are no longer appropriate to the new scenario. This paper presents a new failure detector protocol which implements a new class of detectors, namely ⋄SM, which adapts the properties of the ⋄S class to a dynamic network with an unknown membership. It has the interesting feature to be time-free, so that it does not rely on timers to detect failures; moreover, it tolerates mobility of nodes and message losses.