Multiple Agents RendezVous in a Ring in Spite of a Black Hole

The Rendezvous of anonymous mobile agents in a anonymous network is an intensively studied problem; it calls for k anonymous, mobile agents to gather in the same site. We study this problem when in the network there is a black hole: a stationary process located at a node that destroys any incoming agent without leaving any trace. The presence of the black hole makes it clearly impossible for all agents to rendezvous. So, the research concern is to determine how many agents can gather and under what conditions. In this paper we consider k anonymous, asynchronous mobile agents in an anonymous ring of size n with a black hole; the agents are aware of the existence, but not of the location of such a danger. We study the rendezvous problem in this setting and establish a complete characterization of the conditions under which the problem can be solved. In particular, we determine the maximum number of agents that can be guaranteed to gather in the same location depending on whether k or n i...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2003
• Where: OPODIS
• Authors: Stefan Dobrev, Paola Flocchini, Giuseppe Prencipe, Nicola Santoro
• Keywords: Anonymous Mobile Agents, Black Hole, Mobile Agents, OPODIS 2003, OPODIS 2007