Self-stabilizing tiny interaction protocols

In this paper we extend a variant of population protocols model with the mobile agents paradigm and discuss their self-stabilization. As study case we present the self-stabilizing implementation of a class of token based algorithms. In the curent work we only consider interactions between weak nodes. They are uniform, they do not have unique identifiers, are static and their interactions are restricted to a subset of nodes called neighbors. While interacting, a pair of neighboring nodes may create mobile agents (mobile computational abstractions) that perform traversals of the network and accelerate the system stabilization. In this work we only explore the power of oblivious stateless agents. Our work shows that the agent paradigm is an elegant distributed tool for achieving self-stabilization in tiny interaction protocols. Nevertheless, in order to reach the full power of classical self-stabilizing algorithms more complex classes of agents have to be considered (e.g. agents with memory or identifiers). Interestingly, our work proposes for the first time a model that unifies the recent studies in mobile robots(agents) that evolve in a discrete space and the already established population protocols paradigm.