Protocols with constant local storage and unreliable communication

Abstract

Population protocols are a model of distributed computation intended for the study of networks of independent computing agents with dynamic communication structure. Each agent has a finite number of states, and communication occurs nondeterministically, allowing the involved agents to change their states based on each other's states.In the present paper we study unreliable models based on population protocols and their variations from the point of view of expressive power. We model the effects of message loss. We show that for a general definition of protocols with unreliable communication with constant-storage agents such protocols can only compute predicates computable by immediate observation (IO) population protocols (sometimes also called one-way protocols). Immediate observation population protocols are inherently tolerant to unreliable communication and keep their expressive power under a wide range of fairness conditions. We also prove that a large class of message-based models that are generally more expressive than IO becomes strictly less expressive than IO in the unreliable case.