
TL;DR
This paper introduces a modular approach to population protocols, enabling the design of multi-phase protocols with increased flexibility and demonstrating that their expressive power remains fundamentally semilinear, similar to traditional protocols.
Contribution
It presents a generalized notion of functionality for population protocols, allowing modular composition and multi-phase protocol design, expanding their application scope.
Findings
Protocols can be composed uniformly and mechanically.
The expressive power remains essentially semilinear.
Modular protocols can handle complex behaviors like role distribution.
Abstract
Population protocols are a model of distributed computation intended for the study of networks of independent computing agents with dynamic communication structure. Each agent has a finite number of states, and communication opportunities occur nondeterministically, allowing the agents involved to change their states based on each other's states. Population protocols are often studied in terms of reaching a consensus on whether the input configuration satisfied some predicate. A desirable property of a computation model is modularity, the ability to combine existing simpler computations in a straightforward way. In the present paper we present a more general notion of functionality implemented by a population protocol in terms of multisets of inputs and outputs. This notion allows to design multiphase protocols as combinations of independently defined phases. The additional generality…
Peer Reviews
No public reviews on file for this paper yet. If you reviewed it on a platform where reviews are public (OpenReview, ICLR, NeurIPS, ICML), you can paste yours below so the community can read it here.
Videos
No videos yet. Explain this paper in a talk, walkthrough, or lecture? Add one.
Taxonomy
TopicsDistributed systems and fault tolerance · DNA and Biological Computing · Modular Robots and Swarm Intelligence
