A team of mobile agents, starting from different nodes of an unknown network, possibly at different times, have to meet at the same node and declare that they have all met. Agents have different labels and move in synchronous rounds along links of the network. The above task is known as gathering and was traditionally considered under the assumption that when some agents are at the same node then they can talk. In this paper we ask the question of whether this ability of talking is needed for gathering. The answer turns out to be no. Our main contribution are two deterministic algorithms that always accomplish gathering in a much weaker model. We only assume that at any time an agent knows how many agents are at the node that it currently occupies but agents do not see the labels of other co-located agents and cannot exchange any information with them. They also do not see other nodes than the current one. Our first algorithm works under the assumption that agents know a priori some upper bound N on the network size, and it works in time polynomial in N and in the length l of the smallest label. Our second algorithm does not assume any a priori knowledge about the network but its complexity is exponential in the network size and in the labels of agents. Its purpose is to show feasibility of gathering under this harsher scenario. As a by-product of our techniques we obtain, in the same weak model, the solution of the fundamental problem of leader election among agents. As an application of our result we also solve, in the same model, the well-known gossiping problem: if each agent has a message at the beginning, we show how to make all messages known to all agents, even without any a priori knowledge about the network. If agents know an upper bound N on the network size then our gossiping algorithm works in time polynomial in N, in l and in the length of the largest message.
For the deterministic setting a lot of effort has been dedicated to the study of the feasibility of rendezvous, and to the time required to achieve this task, when feasible. For instance, deterministic rendezvous with agents equipped with tokens used to mark nodes was considered, e.g., in @cite_28 . Deterministic rendezvous of two agents that cannot mark nodes but have unique labels was discussed in @cite_17 @cite_9 . These papers are concerned with the time of rendezvous in arbitrary graphs. In @cite_17 the authors show a rendezvous algorithm polynomial in the size of the graph, in the length of the shorter label and in the delay between the starting time of the agents. In @cite_9 rendezvous time is polynomial in the first two of these parameters and independent of the delay.
@cite_28 @cite_9 @cite_17
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Two identical (anonymous) mobile agents start from arbitrary nodes in an a priori unknown graph and move synchronously from node to node with the goal of meeting. This rendezvous problem has been thoroughly studied, both for anonymous and for labeled agents, along with another basic task, that of exploring graphs by mobile agents. The rendezvous problem is known to be not easier than graph exploration. A well-known recent result on exploration, due to Reingold, states that deterministic exploration of arbitrary graphs can be performed in log-space, i.e., using an agent equipped with O(log n) bits of memory, where n is the size of the graph. In this paper we study the size of memory of mobile agents that permits us to solve the rendezvous problem deterministically. Our main result establishes the minimum size of the memory of anonymous agents that guarantees deterministic rendezvous when it is feasible. We show that this minimum size is Θ(log n), where n is the size of the graph, regardless of the delay between the starting times of the agents. More precisely, we construct identical agents equipped with Θ(log n) memory bits that solve the rendezvous problem in all graphs with at most n nodes, if they start with any delay τ, and we prove a matching lower bound Ω(log n) on the number of memory bits needed to accomplish rendezvous, even for simultaneous start. In fact, this lower bound is achieved already on the class of rings. This shows a significant contrast between rendezvous and exploration: e.g., while exploration of rings (without stopping) can be done using constant memory, rendezvous, even with simultaneous start, requires logarithmic memory. As a by-product of our techniques introduced to obtain log-space rendezvous we get the first algorithm to find a quotient graph of a given unlabeled graph in polynomial time, by means of a mobile agent moving around the graph. The aim of rendezvous in a graph is meeting of two mobile agents at some node of an unknown anonymous connected graph. In this article, we focus on rendezvous in trees, and, analogously to the efforts that have been made for solving the exploration problem with compact automata, we study the size of memory of mobile agents that permits to solve the rendezvous problem deterministically. We assume that the agents are identical, and move in synchronous rounds. We first show that if the delay between the starting times of the agents is arbitrary, then the lower bound on memory required for rendezvous is Ω(log n) bits, even for the line of length n. This lower bound meets a previously known upper bound of O(log n) bits for rendezvous in arbitrary graphs of size at most n. Our main result is a proof that the amount of memory needed for rendezvous with simultaneous start depends essentially on the number e of leaves of the tree, and is exponentially less impacted by the number n of nodes. Indeed, we present two identical agents with O(log e + log log n) bits of memory that solve the rendezvous problem in all trees with at most n nodes and at most e leaves. Hence, for the class of trees with polylogarithmically many leaves, there is an exponential gap in minimum memory size needed for rendezvous between the scenario with arbitrary delay and the scenario with delay zero. Moreover, we show that our upper bound is optimal by proving that Ω(log e + log log n) bits of memory are required for rendezvous, even in the class of trees with degrees bounded by 3. Two mobile agents starting at different nodes of an unknown network have to meet. This task is known in the literature as rendezvous. Each agent has a different label which is a positive integer known to it, but unknown to the other agent. Agents move in an asynchronous way: the speed of agents may vary and is controlled by an adversary. The cost of a rendezvous algorithm is the total number of edge traversals by both agents until their meeting. The only previous deterministic algorithm solving this problem has cost exponential in the size of the graph and in the larger label. In this paper we present a deterministic rendezvous algorithm with cost polynomial in the size of the graph and in the length of the smaller label. Hence we decrease the cost exponentially in the size of the graph and doubly exponentially in the labels of agents. As an application of our rendezvous algorithm we solve several fundamental problems involving teams of unknown size larger than 1 of labeled agents moving asynchronously in unknown networks. Among them are the following problems: team size, in which every agent has to find the total number of agents, leader election, in which all agents have to output the label of a single agent, perfect renaming in which all agents have to adopt new different labels from the set 1,...,k , where k is the number of agents, and gossiping, in which each agent has initially a piece of information (value) and all agents have to output all the values. Using our rendezvous algorithm we solve all these problems at cost polynomial in the size of the graph and in the smallest length of all labels of participating agents. Two mobile agents starting at different nodes of an unknown network have to meet. This task is known in the literature as rendezvous. Each agent has a different label which is a positive integer known to it but unknown to the other agent. Agents move in an asynchronous way: the speed of agents may vary and is controlled by an adversary. The cost of a rendezvous algorithm is the total number of edge traversals by both agents until their meeting. The only previous deterministic algorithm solving this problem has cost exponential in the size of the graph and in the larger label. In this paper we present a deterministic rendezvous algorithm with cost polynomial in the size of the graph and in the length of the smaller label. Hence, we decrease the cost exponentially in the size of the graph and doubly exponentially in the labels of agents. As an application of our rendezvous algorithm we solve several fundamental problems involving teams of unknown size larger than 1 of labeled agents moving asynchronously in...