Consensus with Bounded Space and Minimal Communication

TL;DR

This paper investigates the communication complexity of achieving consensus in population protocols with bounded memory, providing tight bounds and efficient protocols for various memory sizes.

Contribution

It introduces a protocol matching the lower bound for communication complexity and demonstrates fast consensus with limited memory in population protocols.

Findings

Achieves consensus in O(log n) time with optimal communication for certain memory sizes.

Provides a tight bound on communication complexity as a function of memory size.

Shows that the lower bound on communication complexity is sharp.

Abstract

Population protocols are a fundamental model in distributed computing, where many nodes with bounded memory and computational power have random pairwise interactions over time. This model has been studied in a rich body of literature aiming to understand the tradeoffs between the memory and time needed to perform computational tasks. We study the population protocol model focusing on the communication complexity needed to achieve consensus with high probability. When the number of memory states is $s = O(\log \log{n})$, the best upper bound known was given by a protocol with $O(n \log{n})$ communication, while the best lower bound was $\Omega(n \log(n)/s)$ communication. We design a protocol that shows the lower bound is sharp. When each agent has $s=O(\log{n}^{\theta})$ states of memory, with $\theta \in (0,1/2)$, consensus can be reached in time $O(\log(n))$ with $O(n \log{(n)}/s)$ communications with high probability.