ON THE COMPLEXITY OF SOME ADAPTIVE POLLING ALGORITHMS IN GENERAL NETWORKS

We study the problem of adaptive polling in undirected general networks. Polling, also known as broadcast-confirm, consists a propagation round and a feedback round. In adaptive polling, a spanning tree of unknown topology is built dynamically during the propagation round, and feedback messages are free to choose their paths in order to adapt to traffic and fault situations. We study three adaptive polling algorithms and analyze their worst-case communication bit complexities in the propagation round. Then, we prove a lower bound on the worst-case communication bit complexity of Ω(e+nlog n) in the propagation round for all algorithms of the same kind as the three algorithms we study, where n is the number of nodes, and e the number of edges. We conclude that the cost introduced into the network due to the running of an adaptive polling algorithm is mild.