Quiescence of self-stabilizing gossiping among mobile agents in graphs

Abstract: This paper considers gossiping among mobile agents in graphs: agents move on the graph and have to disseminate their initial information to every other agent. We focus on self-stabilizing solutions for the gossip problem, where agents may start from arbitrary locations in arbitrary states. Self-stabilization requires (some of the) participating agents to keep moving forever, hinting at maximizing the number of agents that could be allowed to stop moving eventually. This paper formalizes the self-stabilizing agent gossip problem, introduces the quiescence number (i.e., the maximum number of eventually stopping agents) of self-stabilizing solutions and investigates the quiescence number with respect to several assumptions related to agent anonymity, synchrony, link duplex capacity, and whiteboard capacity. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]