Optimal Fault-Tolerant Dispersion on Oriented Grids

TL;DR

This paper presents a crash-tolerant and Byzantine-resilient dispersion algorithm for mobile robots on oriented grids, achieving optimal time and memory efficiency in fault-prone environments.

Contribution

It introduces the first optimal crash-tolerant dispersion algorithm on oriented grids with minimal memory, and extends it to handle Byzantine faults.

Findings

Crash-tolerant algorithm runs in O(√n) time with O(log n) bits per robot.

Algorithm is proven optimal in time and memory.

Extended to handle weak Byzantine robots with higher memory requirements.

Abstract

Dispersion of mobile robots over the nodes of an anonymous graph is an important problem and turns out to be a crucial subroutine for designing efficient algorithms for many fundamental graph problems via mobile robots. In this problem, starting from an arbitrary initial distribution of $n$ robots across the $n$ nodes, the goal is to achieve a final configuration where each node holds at most one robot. This paper investigates the dispersion problem on an oriented grid, considering the possibility of robot failures (crashes) at any time during the algorithm's execution. We present a crash-tolerant dispersion algorithm that solves the dispersion problem on an anonymous oriented grid in $O(\sqrt{n})$ time and using $O(\log n)$ bits of memory per robot. The algorithm is optimal in terms of both time and memory per robot. We further extend this algorithm to deal with weak Byzantine robots. The weak Byzantine fault dispersion algorithm takes optimal $O(\sqrt{n})$ rounds but requires $O(n\log n)$ bits of memory per robot.