TY - GEN
T1 - Deterministic Symmetry Breaking in Ring Networks
AU - Gasieniec, Leszek
AU - Jurdzinski, Tomasz
AU - Martin, Russell
AU - Stachowicz, Grzegorz
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2015 IEEE.
PY - 2015/7/22
Y1 - 2015/7/22
N2 - We study a distributed coordination mechanism for uniform agents located on a circle. The agents perform their actions in synchronised rounds. At the beginning of each round an agent chooses the direction of its movement from clockwise, anticlockwise, or idle, and moves at unit speed during this round. Agents are not allowed to overpass, i.e., When an agent collides with another it instantly starts moving with the same speed in the opposite direction (without exchanging any information with the other agent). However, at the end of each round each agent has access to limited information regarding its trajectory of movement during this round. We assume that n mobile agents are initially located on a circle unit circumference at arbitrary but distinct positions unknown to other agents. The agents are equipped with unique identifiers from a fixed range. The location discovery task to be performed by each agent is to determine the initial position of every other agent. Our main result states that, if the only available information about movement in a round is limited to distance between the initial and the final position, then there is a superlinear lower bound on time needed to solve the location discovery problem. Interestingly, this result corresponds to a combinatorial symmetry breaking problem, which might be of independent interest. If, on the other hand, an agent has access to the distance to its first collision with another agent in a round, we design an asymptotically efficient and close to optimal solution for the location discovery problem.
AB - We study a distributed coordination mechanism for uniform agents located on a circle. The agents perform their actions in synchronised rounds. At the beginning of each round an agent chooses the direction of its movement from clockwise, anticlockwise, or idle, and moves at unit speed during this round. Agents are not allowed to overpass, i.e., When an agent collides with another it instantly starts moving with the same speed in the opposite direction (without exchanging any information with the other agent). However, at the end of each round each agent has access to limited information regarding its trajectory of movement during this round. We assume that n mobile agents are initially located on a circle unit circumference at arbitrary but distinct positions unknown to other agents. The agents are equipped with unique identifiers from a fixed range. The location discovery task to be performed by each agent is to determine the initial position of every other agent. Our main result states that, if the only available information about movement in a round is limited to distance between the initial and the final position, then there is a superlinear lower bound on time needed to solve the location discovery problem. Interestingly, this result corresponds to a combinatorial symmetry breaking problem, which might be of independent interest. If, on the other hand, an agent has access to the distance to its first collision with another agent in a round, we design an asymptotically efficient and close to optimal solution for the location discovery problem.
KW - bouncing
KW - location discovery
KW - mobile robots
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=84944315931&partnerID=8YFLogxK
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/citedby.url?scp=84944315931&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1109/ICDCS.2015.59
DO - 10.1109/ICDCS.2015.59
M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:84944315931
T3 - Proceedings - International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems
SP - 517
EP - 526
BT - Proceedings - 2015 IEEE 35th International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems, ICDCS 2015
PB - Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc.
T2 - 35th IEEE International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems, ICDCS 2015
Y2 - 29 June 2015 through 2 July 2015
ER -