Mobile agent rendezvous in a ring using faulty tokens

  • Authors:

  • Shantanu Das

  • Affiliations:

  • School of Information Technology and Engineering, University of Ottawa, Canada

  • Venue:
  • ICDCN'08 Proceedings of the 9th international conference on Distributed computing and networking
  • Year:
  • 2008

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Abstract

We consider the rendezvous problem which requires k mobile agents that are dispersed in a ring of size n, to gather at a single node of the network. The problem is difficult to solve when the agents are identical (i.e. indistinguishable), they execute the same deterministic algorithm, and the nodes of the ring are unlabelled (i.e. anonymous). In this case, rendezvous can be achieved by having each agent mark its starting location in the ring using a token. This paper focusses on fault tolerant solutions to the problem when tokens left by an agent may fail unexpectedly. Previous solutions to the problem had several limitations--they either assumed a completely synchronous setting or were restricted to few specific instances of the problem where the value of n is such that gcd(n, k′) = 1 ∀k′ ≤ k. We improve on these results, solving rendezvous in asynchronous rings for arbitrary values of n and k, whenever it is solvable.