The Carrier Pigeon Internet Protocol: An Algorithmic (and Lighthearted) Perspective
Matthias Bentert, Shay Kutten, Darya Melnyk, Tijana Milentijevic, Stefan Schmid

TL;DR
This paper explores algorithmic strategies for efficient pigeon-based communication networks, analyzing the complexity and proposing approximation algorithms for multi-hop pigeon routing to optimize resource use.
Contribution
It introduces algorithms for breeding and scheduling pigeons in network communication, including NP-hardness results and a 2-approximation algorithm for multi-hop scenarios.
Findings
Singlehop pigeon routing is simply characterized.
2-hop and multihop pigeon routing are NP-hard.
A polynomial-time 2-approximation algorithm is proposed for multihop routing.
Abstract
The theoretical model behind the pigeon post as a link layer in a communication network was introduced by Shannon (under the guise of studying One-Time Pads for cryptography). That is, to send a one-hop message to , a node needs a mail pigeon bred and raised at . When sending a message using a pigeon to , node loses the pigeon. To send another message to , node needs another pigeon of . It has been demonstrated that the communication bandwidth achievable with pigeon post can exceed that of networks using other media. This has already motivated the introduction of Internet standards that allow the use of pigeons as Internet link-layer media. In this paper, we begin to fill in the missing piece: designing algorithms for breeding and scheduling pigeons to meet a given communication demand efficiently, minimizing the number of pigeons required. We consider…
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