The LOCAL model is among the main models for studying locality in the framework of distributed network computing. This model is however subject to pertinent criticisms, including the facts that all nodes wake up simultaneously, perform in lock steps, and are failure-free. We show that relaxing these hypotheses to some extent does not hurt local computing. In particular, we show that, for any construction task @math associated to a locally checkable labeling (LCL), if @math is solvable in @math rounds in the LOCAL model, then @math remains solvable in @math rounds in the asynchronous LOCAL model. This improves the result by [SSS 2016], which was restricted to 3-coloring the rings. More generally, the main contribution of this paper is to show that, perhaps surprisingly, asynchrony and failures in the computations do not restrict the power of the LOCAL model, as long as the communications remain synchronous and failure-free.
Abstract We consider two models of computation: centralized local algorithms and local distributed algorithms. Algorithms in one model are adapted to the other model to obtain improved algorithms. Distributed vertex coloring is employed to design improved centralized local algorithms for: maximal independent set, maximal matching, and an approximation scheme for maximum (weighted) matching over bounded degree graphs. The improvement is threefold: the algorithms are deterministic, stateless, and the number of probes grows polynomially in log ⁎ ⁡ n , where n is the number of vertices of the input graph. The recursive centralized local improvement technique by Nguyen and Onak (FOCS 2008) is employed to obtain a distributed approximation scheme for maximum (weighted) matching.