In the population protocol model, many problems cannot be solved in a self-stabilizing way. However, global knowledge, such as the number of nodes in a network, sometimes allows us to design a self-stabilizing protocol for such problems. In this paper, we investigate the effect of global knowledge on the possibility of self-stabilizing population protocols in arbitrary graphs. Specifically, we clarify the solvability of the leader election problem, the ranking problem, the degree recognition problem, and the neighbor recognition problem by self-stabilizing population protocols with knowledge of the number of nodes and/or the number of edges in a network.
@article{arxiv.2003.07491,
title = {The Power of Global Knowledge on Self-stabilizing Population Protocols},
author = {Yuichi Sudo and Masahiro Shibata and Junya Nakamura and Yonghwan Kim and Toshimitsu Masuzawa},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2003.07491},
year = {2020}
}