Distributed Computing by Mobile Entities

Book excerpt: Distributed Computing by Mobile Entities is concerned with the study of the computational and complexity issues arising in systems of decentralized computational entities operating in a spatial universe Encompassing and modeling a large variety of application environments and systems, from robotic swarms to networks of mobile sensors, from software mobile agents in communication networks to crawlers and viruses on the web, the theoretical research in this area intersects distributed computing with the fields of computational geometry (especially for continuous spaces), control theory, graph theory and combinatorics (especially for discrete spaces). The research focus is on determining what tasks can be performed by the entities, under what conditions, and at what cost. In particular, the central question is to determine what minimal hypotheses allow a given problem to be solved. This book is based on the lectures and tutorial presented at the research meeting on “Moving and Computing" (mac) held at La Maddalena Island in June 2017. Greatly expanded, revised and updated, each of the lectures forms an individual Chapter. Together, they provide a map of the current knowledge about the boundaries of distributed computing by mobile entities.