Target for pushdown RBN
Reconfigurable Broadcast Networks (RBN) are a model for large groups of identical agents communicating via unreliable broadcast. A pushdown RBN (PRBN) is simply one where each agent is modeled by a pushdown transition system. A PRBN on a message alphabet is described by a pushdown automaton over the alphabet . Configurations of , i.e., pairs of state and stack content, are called local configurations. A configuration of the PRBN is a function from a finite set of agents to local configurations. A run starts with an arbitrarily large set of agents, all in the initial state with an empty stack . A step consists of one agent taking a transition with a broadcast , and each other agent either not moving or taking a transition (in other words, one agent broadcasts and other agents non-deterministically receive the broadcast or not). Classic problems on such models ask whether a given set of configurations is reachable. A particular case of interest is whether we can reach a configuration where all agents are in a given state . This problem is called Target. The open problem is to find tight complexity bounds on the Target problem for PRBN. The problem on finite-state RBN is known to be solvable in polynomial time. An easy reduction from Horn satisfiability shows PTIME- completeness. On the other hand, one can show that the problem for PRBN is in NP: intuitively, to witness Target, it suffices to one can guess the set of messages of messages used, and two orders on this set, an order of appearance and one of disappearance . Those orders are the one in which messages are first broadcast in the run, and the one in which messages are last broadcast. Then one checks, for each , that there are local runs that broadcast and only receive messages lower for beforehand (resp. greater for afterwards). If they exist, one can construct a run witnessing Target by making many agents follow each of those runs. If a run witnessing Target exists, they can be obtained by taking the local runs of agents broadcasting first and last each message. Is the Target problem for PRBN NP-hard? in PTIME?
