Joining Local Knowledge to Communicate Reliably (Extended Abstract)

TL;DR

This paper investigates reliable message transmission in distributed networks with limited local knowledge, establishing tight conditions for feasibility based on topology, adversary power, and local information exchange.

Contribution

It introduces a unified framework combining the General Adversary model and Partial Knowledge Model to derive tight feasibility conditions for RMT with restricted local knowledge.

Findings

Feasibility conditions depend on network topology, adversary capabilities, and local knowledge.

The models unify existing approaches, providing a comprehensive understanding of RMT under local knowledge constraints.

Conditions are tight, precisely characterizing when reliable message transmission is possible.

Abstract

A fundamental primitive in distributed computing is Reliable Message Transmission (RMT), which refers to the task of correctly sending a message from a party (or player) to another, in a network where some intermediate relays might be controlled by an adversary. We address the problem under the realistic assumption that the topological knowledge of players is restricted to a certain subgraph and specifically study the role of local information exchange in the feasibility of RMT. We employ the General Adversary model of Hirt and Maurer and the recently introduced Partial Knowledge Model which subsume all known models for the adversary and local knowledge respectively. Tight feasibility conditions, naturally involving the network topology, the adversary and the local knowledge of players, are presented.