Self-Stabilizing Robots in Highly Dynamic Environments

Marjorie Bournat (1) , Ajoy K. Datta (2) , Swan Dubois (1)

1 Regal - Large-Scale Distributed Systems and Applications
2 Department of Computer Science [Las Vegas]

This paper deals with the classical problem of exploring a ring by a cohort of synchronous robots. We focus on the perpetual version of this problem in which it is required that each node of the ring is visited by a robot infinitely often. The challenge in this paper is twofold. First, we assume that the robots evolve in a highly dynamic ring, i.e., edges may appear and disappear unpredictably without any recurrence nor periodicity assumption. The only assumption we made is that each node is infinitely often reachable from any other node. Second, we aim at providing a self-stabilizing algorithm to the robots, i.e., the algorithm must guarantee an eventual correct behavior regardless of the initial state and positions of the robots. Our main contribution is to show that this problem is deterministically solvable in this harsh environment by providing a self-stabilizing algorithm for three robots.

Domaines: Informatique [cs]; Calcul parallèle, distribué et partagé [cs.DC]

Marjorie Bournat, Ajoy K. Datta, Swan Dubois. Self-Stabilizing Robots in Highly Dynamic Environments. SSS 2016 - 18th International Symposium Stabilization, Safety, and Security of Distributed Systems, Nov 2016, Lyon, France. pp.54-69, ⟨10.1007/978-3-319-49259-9_5⟩. ⟨hal-01416308⟩