Wireless sensor networks benefit from communication protocols that reduce power requirements by avoiding frame collision. Time Division Media Access methods schedule transmission in slots to avoid collision, however these methods often lack scalability when implemented in ad hoc networks subject to node failures and dynamic topology. This paper reports a distributed algorithm for TDMA slot assignment that is self-stabilizing to transient faults and dynamic topology change. The expected local convergence time is O(1) for any size network satisfying a constant bound on the size of a node neighborhood.

In self-organizing systems, such as mobile ad-hoc and peer-to-peer networks, consensus is a fundamental building block to solve agreement problems. It contributes to coordinate actions of nodes distributed in an ad-hoc manner in order to take consistent decisions. It is well known that in classical environments, in which entities behave asynchronously and where identities are known, consensus cannot be solved in the presence of even one process crash. It appears that self-organizing systems are even less favorable because the set and identity of participants are not known. We define necessary and sufficient conditions under which fault-tolerant consensus become solvable in these environments. Those conditions are related to the synchrony requirements of the environment, as well as the connectivity of the knowledge graph constructed by the nodes in order to communicate with their peers. Ces conditions sont liées aux hypothèses de synchronie sur l'environnement, ainsi qu'à la connectivité du graphe des connaissances induit par les noeuds qui souhaitent communiquer avec leurs pairs.

In large scale multihop wireless networks, flat architectures are not scalable. In order to overcome this major drawback, clusterization is introduced to support selforganization and to enable hierarchical routing. When dealing with multihop wireless networks the robustness is a main issue due to the dynamicity of such networks. Several algorithms have been designed for the clusterization process. As far as we know, very few studies check the robustness feature of their clusterization protocols. Moreover, when it is the case, the evaluation is driven by simulations and never by a theoretical approach.In this paper, we show that a clusterization algorithm, that seems to present good properties of robustness, is self-stabilizing. We propose several enhancements to reduce the stabilization time and to improve stability. The use of a Directed Acyclic Graph ensures that the selfstabilizing properties always hold regardless of the underlying topology. These extra criterion are tested by simulations.

Mobile robot networks emerged in the past few years as a promising distributed computing model. Existing work in the literature typically ensures the correctness of mobile robot protocols via ad hoc handwritten proofs, which, in the case of asynchronous execution models, are both cumbersome and error-prone.In this paper, we propose the first formal model and general verification (by model-checking) methodology for mobile robot protocols operating in a discrete space (that is, the set of possible robot positions is finite). Our contribution is threefold. First, we formally model using synchronized automata a network of mobile robots operating under various synchrony (or asynchrony) assumptions. Then, we use this formal model as input model for the DiVinE model-checker and prove the equivalence of the two models. Third, we verify using DiVinE two known protocols for variants of the ring exploration in an asynchronous setting (exploration with stop and perpetual exclusive exploration).The exploration with stop we verify was manually proved correct only when the number of robots is k > 17, and n (the ring size) and k are co-prime. As the necessity of this bound was not proved in the original paper, our methodology demonstrates that for several instances of k and n not covered in the original paper, the algorithm remains correct. In the case of the perpetual exclusive exploration protocol, our methodology exhibits a counter-example in the completely asynchronous setting where safety is violated, which is used to correct the original protocol.

International audienceIn this paper, we study the exclusive perpetual exploration problem with mobile anonymous and oblivious robots in a discrete space. Our results hold for the most generic settings: robots are asynchronous and are not given any sense of direction, so the left and right sense (i.e. chirality) is decided by the adversary that schedules robots for execution, and may change between invocations of a particular robots (as robots are oblivious). We investigate both the minimal and the maximal number of robots that are necessary and sufficient to solve the exclusive perpetual exploration problem. On the minimal side, we prove that three deterministic robots are necessary and sufficient, provided that the size n of the ring is at least 10, and show that no protocol with three robots can exclusively perpetually explore a ring of size less than 10. On the maximal side, we prove that k = n − 5 robots are necessary and sufficient to exclusively perpetually explore a ring of size n when n is co-prime with k

Abstract. In this paper, we investigate the exclusive perpetual exploration of grid shaped networks using anonymous, oblivious and fully asynchronous robots. Our results hold for robots without sense of direction (i.e. they do not agree on a common North, nor do they agree on a common left and right ; furthermore, the "North" and "left" of each robot is decided by an adversary that schedules robots for execution, and may change between invocations of particular robots). We focus on the minimal number of robots that are necessary and sufficient to solve the problem in general grids. In more details, we prove that three deterministic robots are necessary and sufficient, provided that the size of the grid is n × m with 3 ≤ n ≤ m or n = 2 and m ≥ 4. Perhaps surprisingly, and unlike results for the exploration with stop problem (where grids are "easier" to explore and stop than rings with respect to the number of robots), exclusive perpetual exploration requires as many robots in the ring as in the grid. Furthermore, we propose a classification of configurations such that the space of configurations to be checked is drastically reduced. This pre-processing lays the bases for the automated verification of our algorithm for general grids as it permits to avoid combinatorial explosion.

We consider a set of k autonomous robots that are endowed with visibility sensors (but that are otherwise unable to communicate) and motion actuators. Those robots must collaborate to reach a single vertex that is unknown beforehand, and to remain there hereafter. Previous works on gathering in ring-shaped networks suggest that there exists a tradeoff between the size of the set of potential initial configurations, and the power of the sensing capabilities of the robots (i.e. the larger the initial configuration set, the most powerful the sensor needs to be). We prove that there is no such trade off. We propose a gathering protocol for an odd 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. Our protocol allows the largest set of initial configurations (with respect to impossibility results) yet uses the weakest multiplicity detector to date. The time complexity of our protocol is O(n 2 ), where n denotes the size of the ring. Compared to previous work that also uses local weak multiplicity detection, we do not have the constraint that k < n/2 (here, we simply have 2 < k < n − 3).

Abstract. We propose a framework to build formal developments for robot networks using the COQ proof assistant, to state and to prove formally various properties. We focus in this paper on impossibility proofs, as it is natural to take advantage of the COQ higher order calculus to reason about algorithms as abstract objects. We present in particular formal proofs of two impossibility results for convergence of oblivious mobile robots if respectively more than one half and more than one third of the robots exhibit Byzantine failures, starting from the original theorems by Bouzid et al.. Thanks to our formalization, the corresponding COQ developments are quite compact. To our knowledge, these are the first certified (in the sense of formally proved) impossibility results for robot networks.