Mobile Agent Rendezvous in a Ring

  • Authors:
  • Evangelos Kranakis;Nicola Santoro;Cindy Sawchuk;Danny Krizanc

  • Affiliations:
  • -;-;-;-

  • Venue:
  • ICDCS '03 Proceedings of the 23rd International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems
  • Year:
  • 2003

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Abstract

In the rendezvous search problem, two mobile agentsmust move along the n nodes of a network so as to minimizethe time required to meet or rendezvous. When themobile agents are identical and the network is anonymous,however, the resulting symmetry can make the problem impossibleto solve. Symmetry is typically broken by havingthe mobile agents run either a randomized algorithm or differentdeterministic algorithms. We investigate the use ofidentical tokens to break symmetry so that the two mobileagents can run the same deterministic algorithm. After derivingthe explicit conditions under which identical tokenscanbeused to breaksymmetry onthen node ring, we derivethe lower and upper bounds for the time and memory complexityof the rendezvous search problem with various parametersets. While these results suggest a possible tradeoffbetween the mobile agents' memory and the time complexityof the rendezvous search problem, we prove that this trade-offis limited.