Neighborhood Mutual Remainder: Self-Stabilizing Implementation of Look-Compute-Move Robots (Extended Abstract)

TL;DR

This paper introduces the concept of neighborhood mutual remainder, a new distributed coordination requirement, and provides a self-stabilizing algorithm with applications to robot systems for synchronization and move-atomicity.

Contribution

It formalizes neighborhood mutual remainder and presents the first self-stabilizing algorithms for LCM synchronization in robot systems.

Findings

Proposed a simple self-stabilizing algorithm for neighborhood mutual remainder.

Applied the concept to implement move-atomic property in robot systems.

Developed a self-stabilizing FSYNC scheduler for robots with independent clocks.

Abstract

Local mutual exclusion guarantees that no two neighboring processes enter a critical section at the same time while satisfying both mutual exclusion and no starvation properties. On the other hand, processes may want to execute some operation simultaneously with the neighbors. Of course, we can use a globally synchronized clock to achieve the task but it is very expensive to realize it in a distributed system in general. In this paper, we define a new concept neighborhood mutual remainder. A distributed algorithm that satisfies the neighborhood mutual remainder requirement should satisfy global fairness, l-exclusion and repeated local rendezvous requirements. Global fairness is satisfied when each process (that requests to enter the critical section infinitely often) executes the critical section infinitely often, l-exclusion is satisfied when at most l neighboring processes enter the critical section at the same time, and repeated local rendezvous is satisfied when for each process infinitely often no process in the closed neighborhood is in the critical or trying section. We first formalize the concept of neighborhood mutual remainder, and give a simple self-stabilizing algorithm to demonstrate the design paradigm to achieve neighborhood mutual remainder. We also present two applications of neighborhood mutual remainder to a Look-Compute-Move robot system. One is for implementing a move-atomic property and the other is for implementing FSYNC scheduler, where robots possess an independent clock that is advanced in the same speed. These are the first self-stabilizing implementations of the LCM synchronization.