Optimal Deterministic Rendezvous in Labeled Lines

Abstract: In a rendezvous task, a set of mobile agents dispersed in a network have to gather at an arbitrary common site. We consider the rendezvous problem on the infinite labeled line, with $2$ initially asleep agents, without communication, and a synchronous notion of time. Nodes are labeled with unique positive integers. The initial distance between the two agents is denoted by $D$. Time is divided into rounds. We count time from when an agent first wakes up, and denote by $\tau$ the delay between the agents' wake up times. If awake in a given round $T$, an agent has three options: stay at its current node $v$, take port $0$, or take port $1$. If it decides to stay, the agent is still at node $v$ in round $T+1$. Otherwise, it is at one of the two neighbors of $v$ on the line, based on the port it chose. The agents achieve rendezvous in $T$ rounds if they are at the same node in round $T$. We aim for a deterministic algorithm for this task. The problem was recently considered by Miller and Pelc [DISC 2023]. With $\ell_{\max}$ the largest label of the two starting nodes, they showed that no algorithm can guarantee rendezvous in $o(D \log^* \ell_{\max})$ rounds. The lower bound follows from a connection with the LOCAL model of distributed computing, and holds even if the agents are guaranteed simultaneous wake-up ($\tau = 0$) and are given $D$ as advice. Miller and Pelc also gave an algorithm of optimal matching complexity $O(D \log^* \ell_{\max})$ when $D$ is known to the agents, but only obtained the higher bound of $O(D^2 (\log^* \ell_{\max})^3)$ when $D$ is unknown. We improve this second complexity to a tight $O(D \log^* \ell_{\max})$. In fact, our algorithm achieves rendezvous in $O(D \log^* \ell_{\min})$ rounds, where $\ell_{\min}$ is the smallest label within distance $O(D)$ of the two starting positions.