Population protocols with unreliable communication

Abstract: Population protocols are a model of distributed computation intended for the study of networks of independent computing agents with dynamic communication structure. Each agent has a finite number of states, and communication opportunities occur nondeterministically, allowing the agents involved to change their states based on each other's states. In the present paper we study unreliable models based on population protocols and their variations from the point of view of expressive power. We model the effects of message loss. We show that for a general definition of unreliable protocols with constant-storage agents such protocols can only compute predicates computable by immediate observation population protocols (sometimes also called one-way protocols). Immediate observation population protocols are inherently tolerant of unreliable communication and keep their expressive power under a wide range of fairness conditions. We also prove that a large class of message-based models that are generally more expressive than immediate observation becomes strictly less expressive than immediate observation in the unreliable case.