Brief announcement: Self-stabilizing clock synchronization with 3-bit messages

Lucas Boczkowski, Amos Korman, Emanuele Natale

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

Abstract

This paper is motivated by the aspiration to identify the weakest computational models that allow for efficient, robust distributed computation. We focus on one of the most fundamental building-blocks in distributed computing, namely, Broadcast. In this problem, a unique source agent s needs to disseminate a bit b to the rest of the population. To account for unpredictability issues that may result from uncoordinated executions, we consider a self-stabilizing setting, in which a correct configuration must be reached eventually, despite processors starting the execution with arbitrary initial states (that do not violate the requirement for the existence of a unique source). Similarly to many works on broadcast, we consider a synchronous communication model on a complete anonymous network, in which in each round, each agent can extract information from two other agents, chosen uniformly at random. Our focus is on identifying the smallest message size that is required in order to achieve fast selfstabilizing broadcast. We first observe that with an extra bit added to the message-size and a small additive penalty to the running time, the self-stabilizing broadcast problem can be reduced to a self-stabilizing clock-synchronization problem, where agents aim to synchronize their clocks modulo some integer T. Our main technical contribution lies in solving the latter problem in poly-logarithmic time using only 3 bits per interaction. This allows for a self-stabilizing broadcast protocol that uses only 4 bits per interaction and converges in O∼(log n) time.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationPODC 2016 - Proceedings of the 2016 ACM Symposium on Principles of Distributed Computing
PublisherAssociation for Computing Machinery
Pages207-209
Number of pages3
ISBN (Electronic)9781450339643
DOIs
StatePublished - 25 Jul 2016
Externally publishedYes
Event35th ACM Symposium on Principles of Distributed Computing, PODC 2016 - Chicago, United States
Duration: 25 Jul 201628 Jul 2016

Publication series

NameProceedings of the Annual ACM Symposium on Principles of Distributed Computing
Volume25-28-July-2016

Conference

Conference35th ACM Symposium on Principles of Distributed Computing, PODC 2016
Country/TerritoryUnited States
CityChicago
Period25/07/1628/07/16

Bibliographical note

Publisher Copyright:
© 2016 ACM.

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Software
  • Hardware and Architecture
  • Computer Networks and Communications

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