Fast Self-Stabilizing Minimum Spanning Tree Construction

Abstract: We present a novel self-stabilizing algorithm for minimum spanning tree (MST) construction. The space complexity of our solution is $O(\log<sup>2n)$ bits and it converges in $O(n<sup>2)$ rounds. Thus, this algorithm improves the convergence time of all previously known self-stabilizing asynchronous MST algorithms by a multiplicative factor $\Theta(n)$, to the price of increasing the best known space complexity by a factor $O(\log n)$. The main ingredient used in our algorithm is the design, for the first time in self-stabilizing settings, of a labeling scheme for computing the nearest common ancestor with only $O(\log<sup>2n)$ bits.