Elsevier

Theoretical Computer Science

Volume 809, 24 February 2020, Pages 357-371
Theoretical Computer Science

Space-efficient uniform deployment of mobile agents in asynchronous unidirectional rings,☆☆

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tcs.2019.12.031Get rights and content
Under an Elsevier user license
open archive

Abstract

In this paper, we consider the uniform deployment problem of mobile agents in asynchronous unidirectional ring networks. This problem requires agents to spread uniformly in the network. In this paper, we focus on the memory space per agent required to solve the problem. We consider two problem settings. The first setting assumes that agents have no multiplicity detection, that is, agents cannot detect whether another agent is staying at the same node or not. In this case, we show that each agent requires Ω(logn) memory space to solve the problem, where n is the number of nodes. In addition, we propose an algorithm to solve the problem with O(k+logn) memory space per agent, where k is the number of agents. The second setting assumes that each agent is equipped with the weak multiplicity detection, that is, agents can detect whether another agent is staying at the same node or not, but cannot get any other information about the number of the agents. Then, we show that the memory space per agent can be reduced to O(logk+loglogn). To the best of our knowledge, this is the first research considering the effect of the multiplicity detection on memory space required to solve problems.

Keywords

Distributed system
Mobile agent
Uniform deployment
Ring network
Space-efficient

Cited by (0)

The conference version of this paper is published in the proceedings of 25th International Colloquium on Structural Information and Communication Complexity (SIROCCO 2018).

☆☆

This work was partially supported by JSPS KAKENHI Grant Number 16K00018, 17K19977, and 18K18031, and Japan Science and Technology Agency (JST) SICORP.