Gathering an even number of robots in an odd ring without global multiplicity detection

Abstract

We propose a gathering protocol for an even number of robots in a ring-shaped network that allows symmetric but not periodic configurations as initial configurations, yet uses only local weak multiplicity detection. Robots are assumed to be anonymous and oblivious, and the execution model is the non-atomic CORDA model with asynchronous fair scheduling. In our scheme, the number of robots k must be greater than 8, the number of nodes n on a network must be odd and greater than k + 3. The running time of our protocol is O(n 2) asynchronous rounds. © 2012 Springer-Verlag.