Abstract Consider a networked environment, supporting mobile agents, where there is a black hole: a harmful host that disposes of visiting agents upon their arrival, leaving no observable trace of such a destruction. The black hole search problem is the one of assembling a team of asynchronous mobile agents, executing the same protocol and communicating by means of whiteboards, to successfully identify the location of the black hole; we are concerned with solutions that are generic (i.e., topology-independent). We establish tight bounds on the size of the team (i.e., the number of agents), and the cost (i.e., the number of moves) of a sizeoptimal solution protocol. These bounds depend on the a priori knowledge the agents have about the network, and on the consistency of the local labelings. In particular, we prove that: with topological ignorance + 1 agents are needed and suffice, and the cost is (n 2 ), where is the maximal degree of a node and n is the number of nodes in the network; with topological ignorance but in presence of sense of direction only two agents suffice and the cost is (n 2 ); and with complete topological knowledge only two agents suffice and the cost is (n log n). All the upper-bound proofs are constructive.
In REF , arbitrary topologies have been considered and asymptotically optimal location algorithms have been proposed under a variety of assumptions on the agents' knowledge (knowledge of the topology, presence of sense of direction).
Searching for a black hole in arbitrary networks: optimal mobile agents protocols
Distributed Computing
Distributed Computing
Computer Science Engineering