143,544 research outputs found
Agreement in epidemic information dissemination
Consensus is one of the fundamental problems in multi-agent systems and distributed computing, in which agents or processing nodes are required to reach global agreement on some data value, decision, action, or synchronisation. In the absence of centralised coordination, achieving global consensus is challenging especially in dynamic and large-scale distributed systems with faulty processes. This paper presents a fully decentralised phase transition protocol to achieve global consensus on the convergence of an underlying information dissemination process. The proposed approach is based on Epidemic protocols, which are a randomised communication and computation paradigm and provide excellent scalability and fault-tolerant properties. The experimental analysis is based on simulations of a large-scale information dissemination process and the results show that global agreement can be achieved without deterministic and global communication patterns, such as those based on centralised coordination
Minimizing Message Size in Stochastic Communication Patterns: Fast Self-Stabilizing Protocols with 3 bits
This paper considers the basic model of communication, in
which in each round, each agent extracts information from few randomly chosen
agents. We seek to identify the smallest amount of information revealed in each
interaction (message size) that nevertheless allows for efficient and robust
computations of fundamental information dissemination tasks. We focus on the
Majority Bit Dissemination problem that considers a population of agents,
with a designated subset of source agents. Each source agent holds an input bit
and each agent holds an output bit. The goal is to let all agents converge
their output bits on the most frequent input bit of the sources (the majority
bit). Note that the particular case of a single source agent corresponds to the
classical problem of Broadcast. We concentrate on the severe fault-tolerant
context of self-stabilization, in which a correct configuration must be reached
eventually, despite all agents starting the execution with arbitrary initial
states.
We first design a general compiler which can essentially transform any
self-stabilizing algorithm with a certain property that uses -bits
messages to one that uses only -bits messages, while paying only a
small penalty in the running time. By applying this compiler recursively we
then obtain a self-stabilizing Clock Synchronization protocol, in which agents
synchronize their clocks modulo some given integer , within rounds w.h.p., and using messages that contain bits only.
We then employ the new Clock Synchronization tool to obtain a
self-stabilizing Majority Bit Dissemination protocol which converges in time, w.h.p., on every initial configuration, provided that the
ratio of sources supporting the minority opinion is bounded away from half.
Moreover, this protocol also uses only 3 bits per interaction.Comment: 28 pages, 4 figure
Rational Fair Consensus in the GOSSIP Model
The \emph{rational fair consensus problem} can be informally defined as
follows. Consider a network of (selfish) \emph{rational agents}, each of
them initially supporting a \emph{color} chosen from a finite set .
The goal is to design a protocol that leads the network to a stable
monochromatic configuration (i.e. a consensus) such that the probability that
the winning color is is equal to the fraction of the agents that initially
support , for any . Furthermore, this fairness property must
be guaranteed (with high probability) even in presence of any fixed
\emph{coalition} of rational agents that may deviate from the protocol in order
to increase the winning probability of their supported colors. A protocol
having this property, in presence of coalitions of size at most , is said to
be a \emph{whp\,--strong equilibrium}. We investigate, for the first time,
the rational fair consensus problem in the GOSSIP communication model where, at
every round, every agent can actively contact at most one neighbor via a
\emph{pushpull} operation. We provide a randomized GOSSIP protocol that,
starting from any initial color configuration of the complete graph, achieves
rational fair consensus within rounds using messages of
size, w.h.p. More in details, we prove that our protocol is a
whp\,--strong equilibrium for any and, moreover, it
tolerates worst-case permanent faults provided that the number of non-faulty
agents is . As far as we know, our protocol is the first solution
which avoids any all-to-all communication, thus resulting in message
complexity.Comment: Accepted at IPDPS'1
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