127 research outputs found
Deterministic Symmetry Breaking in Ring Networks
We study a distributed coordination mechanism for uniform agents located on a
circle. The agents perform their actions in synchronised rounds. At the
beginning of each round an agent chooses the direction of its movement from
clockwise, anticlockwise, or idle, and moves at unit speed during this round.
Agents are not allowed to overpass, i.e., when an agent collides with another
it instantly starts moving with the same speed in the opposite direction
(without exchanging any information with the other agent). However, at the end
of each round each agent has access to limited information regarding its
trajectory of movement during this round.
We assume that mobile agents are initially located on a circle unit
circumference at arbitrary but distinct positions unknown to other agents. The
agents are equipped with unique identifiers from a fixed range. The {\em
location discovery} task to be performed by each agent is to determine the
initial position of every other agent.
Our main result states that, if the only available information about movement
in a round is limited to %information about distance between the initial and
the final position, then there is a superlinear lower bound on time needed to
solve the location discovery problem. Interestingly, this result corresponds to
a combinatorial symmetry breaking problem, which might be of independent
interest. If, on the other hand, an agent has access to the distance to its
first collision with another agent in a round, we design an asymptotically
efficient and close to optimal solution for the location discovery problem.Comment: Conference version accepted to ICDCS 201
Deterministic Computations on a PRAM with Static Processor and Memory Faults.
We consider Parallel Random Access Machine (PRAM) which has some processors
and memory cells faulty. The faults considered are static, i.e., once the
machine starts to operate, the operational/faulty status of PRAM components
does not change. We develop a deterministic simulation of a fully operational
PRAM on a similar faulty machine which has constant fractions of faults among
processors and memory cells. The simulating PRAM has processors and
memory cells, and simulates a PRAM with processors and a constant fraction
of memory cells. The simulation is in two phases: it starts with
preprocessing, which is followed by the simulation proper performed in a
step-by-step fashion. Preprocessing is performed in time . The slowdown of a step-by-step part of the simulation is
Fast Space Optimal Leader Election in Population Protocols
The model of population protocols refers to the growing in popularity
theoretical framework suitable for studying pairwise interactions within a
large collection of simple indistinguishable entities, frequently called
agents. In this paper the emphasis is on the space complexity in fast leader
election via population protocols governed by the random scheduler, which
uniformly at random selects pairwise interactions within the population of n
agents.
The main result of this paper is a new fast and space optimal leader election
protocol. The new protocol utilises O(log^2 n) parallel time (which is
equivalent to O(n log^2 n) sequential pairwise interactions), and each agent
operates on O(log log n) states. This double logarithmic space usage matches
asymptotically the lower bound 1/2 log log n on the minimal number of states
required by agents in any leader election algorithm with the running time
o(n/polylog n).
Our solution takes an advantage of the concept of phase clocks, a fundamental
synchronisation and coordination tool in distributed computing. We propose a
new fast and robust population protocol for initialisation of phase clocks to
be run simultaneously in multiple modes and intertwined with the leader
election process. We also provide the reader with the relevant formal
argumentation indicating that our solution is always correct, and fast with
high probability.Comment: 21 pages, 2 figures, published in SODA 2018 proceeding
Foreword: Selected papers from the 22nd International Symposium on Fundamentals of Computation Theory (FCT 2019)
Efficient size estimation and impossibility of termination in uniform dense population protocols
We study uniform population protocols: networks of anonymous agents whose
pairwise interactions are chosen at random, where each agent uses an identical
transition algorithm that does not depend on the population size . Many
existing polylog time protocols for leader election and majority
computation are nonuniform: to operate correctly, they require all agents to be
initialized with an approximate estimate of (specifically, the exact value
). Our first main result is a uniform protocol for
calculating with high probability in time and
states ( bits of memory). The protocol is
converging but not terminating: it does not signal when the estimate is close
to the true value of . If it could be made terminating, this would
allow composition with protocols, such as those for leader election or
majority, that require a size estimate initially, to make them uniform (though
with a small probability of failure). We do show how our main protocol can be
indirectly composed with others in a simple and elegant way, based on the
leaderless phase clock, demonstrating that those protocols can in fact be made
uniform. However, our second main result implies that the protocol cannot be
made terminating, a consequence of a much stronger result: a uniform protocol
for any task requiring more than constant time cannot be terminating even with
probability bounded above 0, if infinitely many initial configurations are
dense: any state present initially occupies agents. (In particular,
no leader is allowed.) Crucially, the result holds no matter the memory or time
permitted. Finally, we show that with an initial leader, our size-estimation
protocol can be made terminating with high probability, with the same
asymptotic time and space bounds.Comment: Using leaderless phase cloc
New Clocks, Fast Line Formation and Self-Replication Population Protocols
In this paper we consider a variant of population protocols in which agents are allowed to be connected by edges, known as the constructors model. During an interaction between two agents the relevant connecting edge can be formed, maintained or eliminated by the transition function. The contributions of this paper are manifold. -- We propose and analyse a novel type of phase clocks allowing to count parallel time in the constructors model. This new type of clocks can be also implemented in the standard population protocol model assuming a unique leader is available. -- The new clock enables a nearly optimal parallel time spanning line construction which improves dramatically on the best previously known parallel time solution. -- We define a probabilistic version of bubble-sort in which random comparisons are allowed only between adjacent numbers in the sequence being sorted. We show that rather surprisingly this probabilistic bubble-sort requires comparisons in expectation, i.e., on the same level as its deterministic counterpart. -- We propose the first self-replication protocol allowing to reproduce a {\em strand} (line-segment carrying information) of length in parallel time This result is based on the probabilistic bubble-sort argument. This protocol permits also simultaneous replication where copies of the strand can be obtained in time All protocols in this paper operate with high probability
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