We study distributed algorithms that find a maximal matching in an anonymous, edge-coloured graph. If the edges are properly coloured with k colours, there is a trivial greedy algorithm that finds a maximal matching in k-1 synchronous communication rounds. The present work shows that the greedy algorithm is optimal in the general case: if A is a deterministic distributed algorithm that finds a maximal matching in anonymous, k-edge-coloured graphs, then there is a worst-case input in which the running time of A is at least k1 rounds. If we focus on graphs of maximum degree Δ, it is known that a maximal matching can be found in O(Δ+ log* k) rounds, and prior work implies a lower bound of Ω(polylog(Δ) + log* k) rounds. Our work closes the gap between upper and lower bounds: the complexity is Θ(Δ+ log* k) rounds. To our knowledge, this is the first linear-in-Δ lower bound for the distributed complexity of a classical graph problem.
Some @math upper bounds are known for graph problems. For example, good approximations of fractional matchings can be found in @math rounds @cite_12 ; however, this does not seem to yield a deterministic @math -time algorithm for any of the above problems. Ha 'n ''s @cite_7 algorithm finds a maximal matching in @math rounds, avoiding the linear dependence on @math ; however, it comes at the cost of a non-optimal dependence on @math .
@cite_7 @cite_12
2011595776 1998137177
By prior work, there is a distributed graph algorithm that finds a maximal fractional matching (maximal edge packing) in @math O() rounds, independently of @math n; here @math  is the maximum degree of the graph and @math n is the number of nodes in the graph. We show that this is optimal: there is no distributed algorithm that finds a maximal fractional matching in @math o() rounds, independently of @math n. Our work gives the first linear-in- @math  lower bound for a natural graph problem in the standard @math LOCAL model of distributed computing--prior lower bounds for a wide range of graph problems have been at best logarithmic in @math . We present a simple distributed @math -approximation algorithm for maximum weight independent set (MaxIS) in the @math model which completes in @math rounds, where @math is the maximum degree, @math is the number of rounds needed to compute a maximal independent set (MIS) on @math , and @math is the maximum weight of a node. Whether our algorithm is randomized or deterministic depends on the MIS algorithm used as a black-box. Plugging in the best known algorithm for MIS gives a randomized solution in @math rounds, where @math is the number of nodes. We also present a deterministic @math -round algorithm based on coloring. We then show how to use our MaxIS approximation algorithms to compute a @math -approximation for maximum weight matching without incurring any additional round penalty in the @math model. We use a known reduction for simulating algorithms on the line graph while incurring congestion, but we show our algorithm is part of a broad family of for which we describe a mechanism that allows the simulation to run in the @math model without an additional overhead. Next, we show that for maximum weight matching, relaxing the approximation factor to ( @math ) allows us to devise a distributed algorithm requiring @math rounds for any constant @math . For the unweighted case, we can even obtain a @math -approximation in this number of rounds. These algorithms are the first to achieve the provably optimal round complexity with respect to dependency on @math .