296 research outputs found
Rendezvous of Heterogeneous Mobile Agents in Edge-weighted Networks
We introduce a variant of the deterministic rendezvous problem for a pair of
heterogeneous agents operating in an undirected graph, which differ in the time
they require to traverse particular edges of the graph. Each agent knows the
complete topology of the graph and the initial positions of both agents. The
agent also knows its own traversal times for all of the edges of the graph, but
is unaware of the corresponding traversal times for the other agent. The goal
of the agents is to meet on an edge or a node of the graph. In this scenario,
we study the time required by the agents to meet, compared to the meeting time
in the offline scenario in which the agents have complete knowledge
about each others speed characteristics. When no additional assumptions are
made, we show that rendezvous in our model can be achieved after time in a -node graph, and that such time is essentially in some cases
the best possible. However, we prove that the rendezvous time can be reduced to
when the agents are allowed to exchange bits of
information at the start of the rendezvous process. We then show that under
some natural assumption about the traversal times of edges, the hardness of the
heterogeneous rendezvous problem can be substantially decreased, both in terms
of time required for rendezvous without communication, and the communication
complexity of achieving rendezvous in time
Asynchronous approach in the plane: A deterministic polynomial algorithm
In this paper we study the task of approach of two mobile agents having the
same limited range of vision and moving asynchronously in the plane. This task
consists in getting them in finite time within each other's range of vision.
The agents execute the same deterministic algorithm and are assumed to have a
compass showing the cardinal directions as well as a unit measure. On the other
hand, they do not share any global coordinates system (like GPS), cannot
communicate and have distinct labels. Each agent knows its label but does not
know the label of the other agent or the initial position of the other agent
relative to its own. The route of an agent is a sequence of segments that are
subsequently traversed in order to achieve approach. For each agent, the
computation of its route depends only on its algorithm and its label. An
adversary chooses the initial positions of both agents in the plane and
controls the way each of them moves along every segment of the routes, in
particular by arbitrarily varying the speeds of the agents. A deterministic
approach algorithm is a deterministic algorithm that always allows two agents
with any distinct labels to solve the task of approach regardless of the
choices and the behavior of the adversary. The cost of a complete execution of
an approach algorithm is the length of both parts of route travelled by the
agents until approach is completed. Let and be the initial
distance separating the agents and the length of the shortest label,
respectively. Assuming that and are unknown to both agents, does
there exist a deterministic approach algorithm always working at a cost that is
polynomial in and ? In this paper, we provide a positive answer to
the above question by designing such an algorithm
Rendezvous in Networks in Spite of Delay Faults
Two mobile agents, starting from different nodes of an unknown network, have
to meet at the same node. Agents move in synchronous rounds using a
deterministic algorithm. Each agent has a different label, which it can use in
the execution of the algorithm, but it does not know the label of the other
agent. Agents do not know any bound on the size of the network. In each round
an agent decides if it remains idle or if it wants to move to one of the
adjacent nodes. Agents are subject to delay faults: if an agent incurs a fault
in a given round, it remains in the current node, regardless of its decision.
If it planned to move and the fault happened, the agent is aware of it. We
consider three scenarios of fault distribution: random (independently in each
round and for each agent with constant probability 0 < p < 1), unbounded adver-
sarial (the adversary can delay an agent for an arbitrary finite number of
consecutive rounds) and bounded adversarial (the adversary can delay an agent
for at most c consecutive rounds, where c is unknown to the agents). The
quality measure of a rendezvous algorithm is its cost, which is the total
number of edge traversals. For random faults, we show an algorithm with cost
polynomial in the size n of the network and polylogarithmic in the larger label
L, which achieves rendezvous with very high probability in arbitrary networks.
By contrast, for unbounded adversarial faults we show that rendezvous is not
feasible, even in the class of rings. Under this scenario we give a rendezvous
algorithm with cost O(nl), where l is the smaller label, working in arbitrary
trees, and we show that \Omega(l) is the lower bound on rendezvous cost, even
for the two-node tree. For bounded adversarial faults, we give a rendezvous
algorithm working for arbitrary networks, with cost polynomial in n, and
logarithmic in the bound c and in the larger label L
Time Versus Cost Tradeoffs for Deterministic Rendezvous in Networks
Two mobile agents, starting from different nodes of a network at possibly
different times, have to meet at the same node. This problem is known as
. Agents move in synchronous rounds. Each agent has a
distinct integer label from the set . Two main efficiency
measures of rendezvous are its (the number of rounds until the
meeting) and its (the total number of edge traversals). We
investigate tradeoffs between these two measures. A natural benchmark for both
time and cost of rendezvous in a network is the number of edge traversals
needed for visiting all nodes of the network, called the exploration time.
Hence we express the time and cost of rendezvous as functions of an upper bound
on the time of exploration (where and a corresponding exploration
procedure are known to both agents) and of the size of the label space. We
present two natural rendezvous algorithms. Algorithm has cost
(and, in fact, a version of this algorithm for the model where the
agents start simultaneously has cost exactly ) and time . Algorithm
has both time and cost . Our main contributions are
lower bounds showing that, perhaps surprisingly, these two algorithms capture
the tradeoffs between time and cost of rendezvous almost tightly. We show that
any deterministic rendezvous algorithm of cost asymptotically (i.e., of
cost ) must have time . On the other hand, we show that any
deterministic rendezvous algorithm with time complexity must have
cost
Gathering in Dynamic Rings
The gathering problem requires a set of mobile agents, arbitrarily positioned
at different nodes of a network to group within finite time at the same
location, not fixed in advanced.
The extensive existing literature on this problem shares the same fundamental
assumption: the topological structure does not change during the rendezvous or
the gathering; this is true also for those investigations that consider faulty
nodes. In other words, they only consider static graphs. In this paper we start
the investigation of gathering in dynamic graphs, that is networks where the
topology changes continuously and at unpredictable locations.
We study the feasibility of gathering mobile agents, identical and without
explicit communication capabilities, in a dynamic ring of anonymous nodes; the
class of dynamics we consider is the classic 1-interval-connectivity.
We focus on the impact that factors such as chirality (i.e., a common sense
of orientation) and cross detection (i.e., the ability to detect, when
traversing an edge, whether some agent is traversing it in the other
direction), have on the solvability of the problem. We provide a complete
characterization of the classes of initial configurations from which the
gathering problem is solvable in presence and in absence of cross detection and
of chirality. The feasibility results of the characterization are all
constructive: we provide distributed algorithms that allow the agents to
gather. In particular, the protocols for gathering with cross detection are
time optimal. We also show that cross detection is a powerful computational
element.
We prove that, without chirality, knowledge of the ring size is strictly more
powerful than knowledge of the number of agents; on the other hand, with
chirality, knowledge of n can be substituted by knowledge of k, yielding the
same classes of feasible initial configurations
Asynchronous Approach in the Plane: A Deterministic Polynomial Algorithm
In this paper we study the task of approach of two mobile agents having the same limited range of vision and moving asynchronously in the plane. This task consists in getting them in finite time within each other\u27s range of vision. The agents execute the same deterministic algorithm and are assumed to have a compass showing the cardinal directions as well as a unit measure. On the other hand, they do not share any global coordinates system (like GPS), cannot communicate and have distinct labels. Each agent knows its label but does not know the label of the other agent or the initial position of the other agent relative to its own. The route of an agent is a sequence of segments that are subsequently traversed in order to achieve approach. For each agent, the computation of its route depends only on its algorithm and its label. An adversary chooses the initial positions of both agents in the plane and controls the way each of them moves along every segment of the routes, in particular by arbitrarily varying the speeds of the agents. Roughly speaking, the goal of the adversary is to prevent the agents from solving the task, or at least to ensure that the agents have covered as much distance as possible before seeing each other. A deterministic approach algorithm is a deterministic algorithm that always allows two agents with any distinct labels to solve the task of approach regardless of the choices and the behavior of the adversary. The cost of a complete execution of an approach algorithm is the length of both parts of route travelled by the agents until approach is completed.
Let Delta and l be the initial distance separating the agents and the length of (the binary representation of) the shortest label, respectively. Assuming that Delta and l are unknown to both agents, does there exist a deterministic approach algorithm whose cost is polynomial in Delta and l?
Actually the problem of approach in the plane reduces to the network problem of rendezvous in an infinite oriented grid, which consists in ensuring that both agents end up meeting at the same time at a node or on an edge of the grid. By designing such a rendezvous algorithm with appropriate properties, as we do in this paper, we provide a positive answer to the above question.
Our result turns out to be an important step forward from a computational point of view, as the other algorithms allowing to solve the same problem either have an exponential cost in the initial separating distance and in the labels of the agents, or require each agent to know its starting position in a global system of coordinates, or only work under a much less powerful adversary
Byzantine Gathering in Polynomial Time
Gathering a group of mobile agents is a fundamental task in the field of distributed and mobile systems. This can be made drastically more difficult to achieve when some agents are subject to faults, especially the Byzantine ones that are known as being the worst faults to handle. In this paper we study, from a deterministic point of view, the task of Byzantine gathering in a network modeled as a graph. In other words, despite the presence of Byzantine agents, all the other (good) agents, starting from {possibly} different nodes and applying the same deterministic algorithm, have to meet at the same node in finite time and stop moving. An adversary chooses the initial nodes of the agents (the number of agents may be larger than the number of nodes) and assigns a different positive integer (called label) to each of them. Initially, each agent knows its label. The agents move in synchronous rounds and can communicate with each other only when located at the same node. Within the team, f of the agents are Byzantine. A Byzantine agent acts in an unpredictable and arbitrary way. For example, it can choose an arbitrary port when it moves, can convey arbitrary information to other agents and can change its label in every round, in particular by forging the label of another agent or by creating a completely new one.
Besides its label, which corresponds to a local knowledge, an agent is assigned some global knowledge denoted by GK that is common to all agents. In literature, the Byzantine gathering problem has been analyzed in arbitrary n-node graphs by considering the scenario when GK=(n,f) and the scenario when GK=f. In the first (resp. second) scenario, it has been shown that the minimum number of good agents guaranteeing deterministic gathering of all of them is f+1 (resp. f+2). However, for both these scenarios, all the existing deterministic algorithms, whether or not they are optimal in terms of required number of good agents, have the major disadvantage of having a time complexity that is exponential in n and L, where L is the value of the largest label belonging to a good agent. In this paper, we seek to design a deterministic solution for Byzantine gathering that makes a concession on the proportion of Byzantine agents within the team, but that offers a significantly lower complexity. We also seek to use a global knowledge whose the length of the binary representation (that we also call size) is small. In this respect, assuming that the agents are in a strong team i.e., a team in which the number of good agents is at least some prescribed value that is quadratic in f, we give positive and negative results. On the positive side, we show an algorithm that solves Byzantine gathering with all strong teams in all graphs of size at most n, for any integers n and f, in a time polynomial in n and the length |l_{min}| of the binary representation of the smallest label of a good agent. The algorithm works using a global knowledge of size O(log log log n), which is of optimal order of magnitude in our context to reach a time complexity that is polynomial in n and |l_{min}|. Indeed, on the negative side, we show that there is no deterministic algorithm solving Byzantine gathering with all strong teams, in all graphs of size at most n, in a time polynomial in n and |l_{min}| and using a global knowledge of size o(log log log n)
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