Distributed Computing in the Asynchronous LOCAL model

The LOCAL model is among the main models for studying locality in the framework of distributed network computing. This model is however subject to pertinent criticisms, including the facts that all nodes wake up simultaneously, perform in lock steps, and are failure-free. We show that relaxing these hypotheses to some extent does not hurt local computing. In particular, we show that, for any construction task $T$ associated to a locally checkable labeling (LCL), if $T$ is solvable in $t$ rounds in the LOCAL model, then $T$ remains solvable in $O(t)$ rounds in the asynchronous LOCAL model. This improves the result by Casta\~neda et al. [SSS 2016], which was restricted to 3-coloring the rings. More generally, the main contribution of this paper is to show that, perhaps surprisingly, asynchrony and failures in the computations do not restrict the power of the LOCAL model, as long as the communications remain synchronous and failure-free

List Defective Colorings: Distributed Algorithms and Applications

The distributed coloring problem is at the core of the area of distributed graph algorithms and it is a problem that has seen tremendous progress over the last few years. Much of the remarkable recent progress on deterministic distributed coloring algorithms is based on two main tools: a) defective colorings in which every node of a given color can have a limited number of neighbors of the same color and b) list coloring, a natural generalization of the standard coloring problem that naturally appears when colorings are computed in different stages and one has to extend a previously computed partial coloring to a full coloring. In this paper, we introduce \emph{list defective colorings}, which can be seen as a generalization of these two coloring variants. Essentially, in a list defective coloring instance, each node $v$ is given a list of colors $x_{v,1},\dots,x_{v,p}$ together with a list of defects $d_{v,1},\dots,d_{v,p}$ such that if $v$ is colored with color $x_{v, i}$, it is allowed to have at most $d_{v, i}$ neighbors with color $x_{v, i}$. We highlight the important role of list defective colorings by showing that faster list defective coloring algorithms would directly lead to faster deterministic $(\Delta+1)$-coloring algorithms in the LOCAL model. Further, we extend a recent distributed list coloring algorithm by Maus and Tonoyan [DISC '20]. Slightly simplified, we show that if for each node $v$ it holds that $\sum_{i=1}^p \big(d_{v,i}+1)^2 > \mathrm{deg}_G^2(v)\cdot polylog\Delta$ then this list defective coloring instance can be solved in a communication-efficient way in only $O(\log\Delta)$ communication rounds. This leads to the first deterministic $(\Delta+1)$-coloring algorithm in the standard CONGEST model with a time complexity of $O(\sqrt{\Delta}\cdot polylog \Delta+\log^* n)$, matching the best time complexity in the LOCAL model up to a $polylog\Delta$ factor