More efficient periodic traversal in anonymous undirected graphs

  • Authors:

  • Jurek Czyzowicz;Stefan Dobrev;Leszek Gąsieniec;David Ilcinkas;Jesper Jansson;Ralf Klasing;Ioannis Lignos;Russell Martin;Kunihiko Sadakane;Wing-Kin Sung

  • Affiliations:

  • Département d'Informatique, Université du Québec en Outaouais, Gatineau, Québec, Canada;Institute of Mathematics, Slovak Academy of Sciences, Bratislava, Slovak Republic;Department of Computer Science, University of Liverpool, Liverpool, U.K.;LaBRI, CNRS and Université de Bordeaux, Talence, France;Ochanomizu University, Tokyo, Japan;LaBRI, CNRS and Université de Bordeaux, Talence, France;Department of Computer Science, Durham University, Durham, UK;Department of Computer Science, University of Liverpool, Liverpool, U.K.;Principles of Informatics Research Division, National Institute of Informatics, Tokyo, Japan;Department of Computer Science, National University of Singapore, Singapore

  • Venue:
  • SIROCCO'09 Proceedings of the 16th international conference on Structural Information and Communication Complexity
  • Year:
  • 2009

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Abstract

We consider the problem of periodic graph exploration in which a mobile entity with (at most) constant memory, an agent, has to visit all n nodes of an arbitrary undirected graph G in a periodic manner. Graphs are supposed to be anonymous, that is, nodes are unlabeled. However, while visiting a node, the robot has to distinguish between edges incident to it. For each node v the endpoints of the edges incident to v are uniquely identified by different integer labels called port numbers. We are interested in the minimisation of the length of the exploration period. This problem is unsolvable if the local port numbers are set arbitrarily, see [1]. However, surprisingly small periods can be achieved when assigning carefully the local port numbers. Dobrev et al. [2] described an algorithm for assigning port numbers, and an oblivious agent (i.e., an agent with no persistent memory) using it, such that the agent explores all graphs of size n within period 10n. Providing the agent with a constant number of memory bits, the optimal length of the period was proved in [3] to be no more than 3.75n (using a different assignment of the port numbers). In this paper, we improve both these bounds. More precisely, we show a period of length at most $4\frac{1}{3}n$ for oblivious agents, and a period of length at most 3.5n for agents with constant memory. Finally, we give the first non-trivial lower bound, 2.8n, on the period length for the oblivious case.