Distributed computation of temporal twins in periodic undirected time-varying graphs

TL;DR

This paper introduces a distributed algorithm to identify $( riangle,d)$-twins in periodic time-varying graphs, enabling nodes to find substitutes over time with efficient message sizes.

Contribution

It presents a deterministic distributed method for enumerating twin nodes in periodic dynamic graphs, with optimized message complexity and probabilistic size reduction.

Findings

Deterministic algorithm completes in 2p rounds.

Message size reduced to O(log n) with randomized techniques.

Applicable to large-scale periodic time-varying networks.

Abstract

Twin nodes in a static network capture the idea of being substitutes for each other for maintaining paths of the same length anywhere in the network. In dynamic networks, we model twin nodes over a time-bounded interval, noted $(\Delta,d)$-twins, as follows. A periodic undirected time-varying graph $\mathcal G=(G_t)_{t\in\mathbb N}$ of period $p$ is an infinite sequence of static graphs where $G_t=G_{t+p}$ for every $t\in\mathbb N$. For $\Delta$ and $d$ two integers, two distinct nodes $u$ and $v$ in $\mathcal G$ are $(\Delta,d)$-twins if, starting at some instant, the outside neighbourhoods of $u$ and $v$ has non-empty intersection and differ by at most $d$ elements for $\Delta$ consecutive instants. In particular when $d=0$, $u$ and $v$ can act during the $\Delta$ instants as substitutes for each other in order to maintain journeys of the same length in time-varying graph $\mathcal G$. We propose a distributed deterministic algorithm enabling each node to enumerate its $(\Delta,d)$-twins in $2p$ rounds, using messages of size $O(\delta_\mathcal G\log n)$, where $n$ is the total number of nodes and $\delta_\mathcal G$ is the maximum degree of the graphs $G_t$'s. Moreover, using randomized techniques borrowed from distributed hash function sampling, we reduce the message size down to $O(\log n)$ w.h.p.