Abstract
A network with unknown participants is a communication network where the processes have very partial knowledge of the system. Nodes do not know the full set of participating nodes and some nodes do not even know the full set of nodes they can communicate directly with. It is a “contact list” like network where the initial communication is possibly asymmetric and one can communicate with an unknown neighbour only if one has been first contacted by this neighbour. This model is quite natural and of important theoretical interest. It has also proved useful for the study of bootstrapping mobile ad hoc networks. In this paper, we investigate the classical Leader Election problem in general networks with unknown participants.
We give the first necessary and sufficient condition on global knowledge that nodes should be provided in order to solve Election problem. Since Election problem is a useful benchmark in distributed computability investigations, this result could lead to a complete characterisation of what is solvable in networks with unknown participants.
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Chalopin, J., Godard, E., Naudin, A. (2014). What Do We Need to Know to Elect in Networks with Unknown Participants?. In: Halldórsson, M.M. (eds) Structural Information and Communication Complexity. SIROCCO 2014. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 8576. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-09620-9_22
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-09620-9_22
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
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