Quiescence of Self-stabilizing Gossiping among Mobile Agents in Graphs

TL;DR

This paper studies self-stabilizing gossip algorithms among mobile agents in graphs, introducing the concept of quiescence number to quantify how many agents can stop moving while still ensuring information dissemination.

Contribution

It formalizes the self-stabilizing agent gossip problem and defines the quiescence number, analyzing its bounds under various system assumptions.

Findings

Introduces the quiescence number as a measure of agent quiescence.

Provides bounds on the quiescence number based on system assumptions.

Analyzes the impact of anonymity, synchrony, and communication capacities.

Abstract

This paper considers gossiping among mobile agents in graphs: agents move on the graph and have to disseminate their initial information to every other agent. We focus on self-stabilizing solutions for the gossip problem, where agents may start from arbitrary locations in arbitrary states. Self-stabilization requires (some of the) participating agents to keep moving forever, hinting at maximizing the number of agents that could be allowed to stop moving eventually. This paper formalizes the self-stabilizing agent gossip problem, introduces the quiescence number (i.e., the maximum number of eventually stopping agents) of self-stabilizing solutions and investigates the quiescence number with respect to several assumptions related to agent anonymity, synchrony, link duplex capacity, and whiteboard capacity.