Stone age distributed computing

  • Authors:
  • Yuval Emek;Roger Wattenhofer

  • Affiliations:
  • ETH Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland;ETH Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 2013 ACM symposium on Principles of distributed computing
  • Year:
  • 2013

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Abstract

A new model that depicts a network of randomized finite state machines operating in an asynchronous environment is introduced. This model, that can be viewed as a hybrid of the message passing model and cellular automata is suitable for applying the distributed computing lens to the study of networks of sub-microprocessor devices, e.g., biological cellular networks and man-made nano-networks. Although the computation and communication capabilities of each individual device in the new model are, by design, much weaker than those of an abstract computer, we show that some of the most important and extensively studied distributed computing problems can still be solved efficiently.