Distinguishing Views in Symmetric Networks: A Tight Lower Bound

The view of a node in a port-labeled network is an infinite tree encoding all walks in the network originating from this node. We prove that for any integers $n\geq D\geq 1$, there exists a port-labeled network with at most $n$ nodes and diameter at most $D$ which contains a pair of nodes whose (infinite) views are different, but whose views truncated to depth $\Omega(D\log (n/D))$ are identical

Deterministic Leader Election for Stationary Programmable Matter with Common Direction

Leader Election is an important primitive for programmable matter, since it is often an intermediate step for the solution of more complex problems. Although the leader election problem itself is well studied even in the specific context of programmable matter systems, research on fault tolerant approaches is more limited. We consider the problem in the previously studied Amoebot model on a triangular grid, when the configuration is connected but contains nodes the particles cannot move to (e.g., obstacles). We assume that particles agree on a common direction (i.e., the horizontal axis) but do not have chirality (i.e., they do not agree on the other two directions of the triangular grid). We begin by showing that an election algorithm with explicit termination is not possible in this case, but we provide an implicitly terminating algorithm that elects a unique leader without requiring any movement. These results are in contrast to those in the more common model with chirality but no agreement on directions, where explicit termination is always possible but the number of elected leaders depends on the symmetry of the initial configuration. Solving the problem under the assumption of one common direction allows for a unique leader to be elected in a stationary and deterministic way, which until now was only possible for simply connected configurations under a sequential scheduler.Comment: 23 pages, Accepted by SIROCCO 202