A pleasant stroll through the land of infinitely many creatures

Abstract

Many distributed algorithms are designed for a system with a fixed set of n processes. However, some systems may dynamically change and expand over time,so that the number of processes may grow to infinity as time tends to infinity. This paper considers such systems, and gives algorithms that are new and simple (but not necessarily efficient) for common problems. The reason for simplicity is to better expose some of the algorithmic techniques for dealing with infinitely many processes. A brief summary of existing work in the subject is also provided.