Affiliation:
1. University of Freiburg, Freiburg, Germany
2. Microsoft Research, Beijing, China
3. ETH Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland
Abstract
The question of what can be computed, and how efficiently, is at the core of computer science. Not surprisingly, in distributed systems and networking research, an equally fundamental question is what can be computed in a
distributed
fashion. More precisely, if nodes of a network must base their decision on information in their local neighborhood only, how well can they compute or approximate a global (optimization) problem? In this paper we give the first polylogarithmic lower bound on such local computation for (optimization) problems including minimum vertex cover, minimum (connected) dominating set, maximum matching, maximal independent set, and maximal matching. In addition, we present a new distributed algorithm for solving general covering and packing linear programs. For some problems this algorithm is tight with the lower bounds, whereas for others it is a distributed approximation scheme. Together, our lower and upper bounds establish the local computability and approximability of a large class of problems, characterizing how much local information is required to solve these tasks.
Publisher
Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)
Subject
Artificial Intelligence,Hardware and Architecture,Information Systems,Control and Systems Engineering,Software
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