A fundamental problem for overlay networks is to safely exclude leaving nodes, i.e., the nodes requesting to leave the overlay network are excluded from it without affecting its connectivity. There are a number of studies for safe node exclusion if the overlay is in a well-defined state, but almost no formal results are known for the case in which the overlay network is in an arbitrary initial state, i.e., when looking for a self-stabilizing solution for excluding leaving nodes. We study this problem in two variants: the Finite Departure Problem (FDP) and the Finite Sleep Problem (FSP). In the FDP the leaving nodes have to irrevocably decide when it is safe to leave the network, whereas in the FSP, this leaving decision does not have to be final: the nodes may resume computation when woken up by an incoming message. We are the first to present a self-stabilizing protocol for the FDP and the FSP that can be combined with a large class of overlay maintenance protocols so that these are then guaranteed to safely exclude leaving nodes from the system from any initial state while operating as specified for the staying nodes. In order to formally define the properties these overlay maintenance protocols have to satisfy, we identify four basic primitives for manipulating edges in an overlay network that might be of independent interest.

Nanoparticles are getting more and more in the focus of the scientific community since the potential for the development of very small particles interacting with each other and completing medical and other tasks is getting bigger year by year. In this work we introduce a distributed local algorithm for arranging a set of nanoparticles on the discrete plane into specific geometric shapes, for instance a rectangle. The concept of a particle we use can be seen as a simple mobile robot with the following restrictions: it can only view the state of robots it is physically connected to, is anonymous, has only a constant size memory, can only move by using other particles as an anchor point on which it pulls itself alongside, and it operates in Look-Compute-Move cycles. The main result of this work is the presentation of a random distributed local algorithm which transforms any given connected set of particles into a particular geometric shape. As an example we provide a version of this algorithm for forming a rectangle with an arbitrary predefined aspect ratio. To the best of our knowledge this is the first work that considers arrangement problems for these types of robots.

Small-world networks have received significant attention because of their potential as models for the interaction networks of complex systems. Specifically, neither random networks nor regular lattices seem to be an adequate framework within which to study real-world complex systems such as chemical-reaction networks, neural networks, food webs, social networks, scientific-collaboration networks, and computer networks. Small-world networks provide some desired properties like an expected poly logarithmic distance between two processes in the network, which allows routing in poly logarithmic hops by simple greedy routing, and robustness against attacks or failures. By these properties, small-world networks are possible solutions for large overlay networks comparable to structured overlay networks like CAN, Pastry, Chord, which also provide poly logarithmic routing, but due to their uniform structure, structured overlay networks are more vulnerable to attacks or failures. In this paper we bring together a randomized process converging to a small-world network and a self-stabilization process so that a small-world network is formed out of any weakly connected initial state. To the best of our knowledge this is the first distributed self-stabilization process for building a small-world network.

The Chord peer-to-peer system is considered, together with CAN, Tapestry and Pastry, as one of the pioneering works on peer-to-peer distributed hash tables (DHT) that inspired a large volume of papers and projects on DHTs as well as peer-to-peer systems in general. Chord, in particular, has been studied thoroughly, and many variants of Chord have been presented that optimize various criteria. Also, several implementations of Chord are available on various platforms. Though Chord is known to be very efficient and scalable and it can handle churn quite well, no protocol is known yet that guarantees that Chord is self-stabilizing, i.e., the Chord network can be recovered from any initial state in which the network is still weakly connected. This is not too surprising since it is known that in the Chord network it is not locally checkable whether its current topology matches the correct topology. We present a slight extension of the Chord network, called Re-Chord (reactive Chord), that turns out to be locally checkable, and we present a self-stabilizing distributed protocol for it that can recover the Re-Chord network from any initial state, in which the n peers are weakly connected, in O(n log n) communication rounds. We also show that our protocol allows a new peer to join or an old peer to leave an already stable Re-Chord network so that within O((log n)2) communication rounds the Re-Chord network is stable again.

We study the problem of greedy, single path data propagation in wireless sensor networks, aiming mainly to minimize the energy dissipation. In particular, we first mathematically analyze and experimentally evaluate the energy efficiency and latency of three characteristic protocols, each one selecting the next hop node with respect to a different criterion (minimum projection, minimum angle and minimum distance to the destination). Our analytic and simulation findings suggest that any single criterion does not simultaneously satisfy both energy efficiency and low latency. Towards parameterized energy-latency trade-offs we provide as well hybrid combinations of the two criteria (direction and proximity to the sink). Our hybrid protocols achieve significant perfomance gains and allow fine-tuning of desired performance. Also, they have nice energy balance properties, and can prolong the network lifetime.