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On the Power of Anonymous One-Way Communication

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Principles of Distributed Systems (OPODIS 2005)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNTCS,volume 3974))

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Abstract

We consider a population of anonymous processes communicating via anonymous message-passing, where the recipient of each message is chosen by an adversary and the sender is not identified to the recipient. Even with unbounded message sizes and process states, such a system can compute only limited predicates on inputs held by the processes. In the finite-state case, we show how the exact strength of the model depends critically on design choices that are irrelevant in the unbounded-state case, such as whether messages are delivered immediately or after a delay, whether a sender can record that it has sent a message, and whether a recipient can queue incoming messages, refusing to accept new messages until it has had a chance to send out messages of its own. These results may have implications for the design of distributed systems where processor power is severely limited, as in sensor networks.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science, Yale University, USA

    Dana Angluin & James Aspnes

  2. Department of Computer Science, University of Rochester, USA

    David Eisenstat

  3. Department of Computer Science and Engineering, York University, USA

    Eric Ruppert

Authors
  1. Dana Angluin
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  2. James Aspnes
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  3. David Eisenstat
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  4. Eric Ruppert
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, USA

    James H. Anderson

  2. Università di Pisa, Italy

    Giuseppe Prencipe

  3. ETH Zurich, 8092, Zurich, Switzerland

    Roger Wattenhofer

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© 2006 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

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Angluin, D., Aspnes, J., Eisenstat, D., Ruppert, E. (2006). On the Power of Anonymous One-Way Communication. In: Anderson, J.H., Prencipe, G., Wattenhofer, R. (eds) Principles of Distributed Systems. OPODIS 2005. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 3974. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/11795490_30

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/11795490_30

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-540-36321-7

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-540-36322-4

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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