Abstract
An alternator is a network of concurrent processes, which satisfies the following conditions. (1) If one process executes the critical step, no neighbor of the process executes the critical step at the same time. (2) Along any infinite time, each process executes the critical step infinitely often. (3) The alternator is self-stabilizing to the above conditions.In this paper, we proposed a design of alternators for rings. The protocol is optimal in the sense that each node can execute the critical step at least once every three steps when it works on rings of odd size.