Consensus in the presence of partial synchrony
Journal of the ACM (JACM)
Introduction to Distributed Algorithms
Introduction to Distributed Algorithms
Proceedings of the 10th international conference on Architectural support for programming languages and operating systems
Probabilistic routing in intermittently connected networks
ACM SIGMOBILE Mobile Computing and Communications Review
Computation in networks of passively mobile finite-state sensors
Distributed Computing - Special issue: PODC 04
Impact of Human Mobility on Opportunistic Forwarding Algorithms
IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing
Crossing over the bounded domain: from exponential to power-law inter-meeting time in MANET
Proceedings of the 13th annual ACM international conference on Mobile computing and networking
Power law and exponential decay of inter contact times between mobile devices
Proceedings of the 13th annual ACM international conference on Mobile computing and networking
Proceedings of the 1st ACM SIGMOBILE workshop on Mobility models
On utilizing speed in networks of mobile agents
Proceedings of the 29th ACM SIGACT-SIGOPS symposium on Principles of distributed computing
Theoretical Computer Science
Computing time complexity of population protocols with cover times: the zebranet example
SSS'11 Proceedings of the 13th international conference on Stabilization, safety, and security of distributed systems
Self-stabilizing leader election in networks of finite-state anonymous agents
OPODIS'06 Proceedings of the 10th international conference on Principles of Distributed Systems
Self-stabilizing synchronization in mobile sensor networks with covering
DCOSS'10 Proceedings of the 6th IEEE international conference on Distributed Computing in Sensor Systems
Self-stabilizing counting in mobile sensor networks with a base station
DISC'07 Proceedings of the 21st international conference on Distributed Computing
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Population protocols are a communication model for large sensor networks with resource-limited anonymous mobile agents. The agents move asynchronously and communicate via pairwise interactions. The original fairness assumption of this model involves a high level of asynchrony and prevents evaluation of the convergence time of a protocol (via deterministic means). The introduction of some ''partial synchrony'' in the model, under the form of cover times, is an extension that allows evaluating the time complexities. In this paper, we take advantage of this extension and study a data collection protocol used in the ZebraNet project for the wild-life tracking of zebras in a reserve in central Kenya. In ZebraNet, sensors are attached to zebras. The sensed data can be exchanged between the sensors and is collected regularly by a mobile base station crossing the area. The data collection protocol of ZebraNet has been analyzed through simulations. Here, we present a purely analytical study using the model of population protocols with cover times. Our first result states that, in the original protocol, some data may never be delivered to the base station. Motivated by this drawback, we propose two modified and correct protocols which are then used as the paper case studies. We prove their correctness and we compute their tight worst-case time complexities. This analysis introduces several techniques that may prove useful in future studies of time in population protocols.