The role of unique node identifiers in network computing is well understood
as far as symmetry breaking is concerned. However, the unique identifiers also
leak information about the computing environment - in particular, they provide
some nodes with information related to the size of the network. It was recently
proved that in the context of local decision, there are some decision problems
such that (1) they cannot be solved without unique identifiers, and (2) unique
node identifiers leak a sufficient amount of information such that the problem
becomes solvable (PODC 2013).
In this work we give study what is the minimal amount of information that we
need to leak from the environment to the nodes in order to solve local decision
problems. Our key results are related to scalar oracles f that, for any given
n, provide a multiset f(n) of n labels; then the adversary assigns the
labels to the n nodes in the network. This is a direct generalisation of the
usual assumption of unique node identifiers. We give a complete
characterisation of the weakest oracle that leaks at least as much information
as the unique identifiers.
Our main result is the following dichotomy: we classify scalar oracles as
large and small, depending on their asymptotic behaviour, and show that (1) any
large oracle is at least as powerful as the unique identifiers in the context
of local decision problems, while (2) for any small oracle there are local
decision problems that still benefit from unique identifiers.Comment: Conference version to appear in the proceedings of SIROCCO 201
