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Population Protocols with Unreliable Communication

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Algorithms for Sensor Systems (ALGOSENSORS 2021)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNCCN,volume 12961))

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Abstract

Population protocols are a model of distributed computation intended for the study of networks of independent computing agents with dynamic communication structure. Each agent has a finite number of states, and communication occurs nondeterministically, allowing the involved agents to change their states based on each other’s states.

In the present paper we study unreliable models based on population protocols and their variations from the point of view of expressive power. We model the effects of message loss. We show that for a general definition of protocols with unreliable communication with constant-storage agents such protocols can only compute predicates computable by immediate observation (IO) population protocols (sometimes also called one-way protocols). Immediate observation population protocols are inherently tolerant to unreliable communication and keep their expressive power under a wide range of fairness conditions. We also prove that a large class of message-based models that are generally more expressive than IO becomes strictly less expressive than IO in the unreliable case.

The project has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 787367 (PaVeS).

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Acknowledgements

I thank Javier Esparza for useful discussions and the feedback on the drafts of the present article. I thank Chana Weil-Kennedy for useful discussions. I thank the anonymous reviewers for their valuable feedback on presentation.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Technical University of Munich, Munich, Germany

    Mikhail Raskin

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  1. Mikhail Raskin
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Correspondence to Mikhail Raskin .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of Liverpool, Liverpool, UK

    Leszek Gąsieniec

  2. CNRS and University of Bordeaux, Talence, France

    Ralf Klasing

  3. King's College London, London, UK

    Tomasz Radzik

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Raskin, M. (2021). Population Protocols with Unreliable Communication. In: Gąsieniec, L., Klasing, R., Radzik, T. (eds) Algorithms for Sensor Systems. ALGOSENSORS 2021. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 12961. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-89240-1_10

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-89240-1_10

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  • Online ISBN: 978-3-030-89240-1

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