Abstract
In the renaming problem, each process in a distributed system is issued a unique name from a large name space, and the processes must coordinate with one another to choose unique names from a much smaller name space.
We show that lower bounds on the solvability of renaming in an asynchronous distributed system can be formulated as a purely topological question about the existence of an equivariant chain map from a “topological disk” to a “topological annulus”. Proving the non-existence of such a map implies the non-existence of a distributed renaming algorithm in several related models of computation.
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Castañeda, A., Herlihy, M., Rajsbaum, S. (2012). An Equivariance Theorem with Applications to Renaming. In: Fernández-Baca, D. (eds) LATIN 2012: Theoretical Informatics. LATIN 2012. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 7256. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-29344-3_12
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-29344-3_12
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