Deterministic Collision-Free Exploration of Unknown Anonymous Graphs

TL;DR

This paper presents a deterministic, collision-free exploration algorithm for two anonymous agents in unknown graphs, achieving polynomial time with vision radius 2, and proves impossibility with radius 1.

Contribution

It introduces a novel collision-free exploration algorithm for anonymous graphs with agents having radius-2 vision, and establishes the impossibility with radius-1 vision.

Findings

Algorithm works in polynomial time for graphs larger than 2 nodes.

Collision-free exploration is impossible with only radius-1 vision.

The approach applies to arbitrary unknown graphs.

Abstract

We consider the fundamental task of network exploration. A network is modeled as a simple connected undirected n-node graph with unlabeled nodes, and all ports at any node of degree d are arbitrarily numbered 0,.....,d-1. Each of two identical mobile agents, initially situated at distinct nodes, has to visit all nodes and stop. Agents execute the same deterministic algorithm and move in synchronous rounds: in each round, an agent can either remain at the same node or move to an adjacent node. Exploration must be collision-free: in every round at most one agent can be at any node. We assume that agents have vision of radius 2: an awake agent situated at a node v can see the subgraph induced by all nodes at a distance at most 2 from v, sees all port numbers in this subgraph, and the agents located at these nodes. Agents do not know the entire graph but they know an upper bound n on its size. The time of an exploration is the number of rounds since the wakeup of the later agent to the termination by both agents. We show a collision-free exploration algorithm working in time polynomial in n, for arbitrary graphs of size larger than 2. Moreover, we show that if agents have only vision of radius 1, then collision-free exploration is impossible, e.g., in any tree of diameter 2.