Efficient distributed random walks with applications

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Abstract: We focus on the problem of performing random walks efficiently in a distributed network. Given bandwidth constraints, the goal is to minimize the number of rounds required to obtain a random walk sample. We first present a fast sublinear time distributed algorithm for performing random walks whose time complexity is sublinear in the length of the walk. Our algorithm performs a random walk of length ell in ildeO(sqrtellD) rounds (with high probability) on an undirected network, where D is the diameter of the network. This improves over the previous best algorithm that ran in ildeO(ell2/3D1/3) rounds (Das Sarma et al., PODC 2009). We further extend our algorithms to efficiently perform k independent random walks in ildeO(sqrtkellD+k) rounds. We then show that there is a fundamental difficulty in improving the dependence on ell any further by proving a lower bound of Omega(sqrtfracelllogell+D) under a general model of distributed random walk algorithms. Our random walk algorithms are useful in speeding up distributed algorithms for a variety of applications that use random walks as a subroutine. We present two main applications. First, we give a fast distributed algorithm for computing a random spanning tree (RST) in an arbitrary (undirected) network which runs in ildeO(sqrtmD) rounds (with high probability; here m is the number of edges). Our second application is a fast decentralized algorithm for estimating mixing time and related parameters of the underlying network. Our algorithm is fully decentralized and can serve as a building block in the design of topologically-aware networks.






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