Distributed computing on regular networks with anonymous nodes

Presents efficient algorithms for collecting information distributed among indistinguishable (anonymous) processors while performing certain operations on the information being collected. The efficiency objective is to minimize the communication-delay product and to obtain trade-offs between the two. The main contribution of the paper is a new efficient algorithm for performing sumlike operations (such as Abelian group operations and elementary symmetric functions) and the use of metrically regular graphs (which include the widely used hypercube interconnections) for information dissemination in distributed computations. The best algorithm has a communication-delay product of O(Nlog³ N) (for W nodes), and obtaining an optimal Ω(Nlog²N) algorithm remains an open problem