PODC 2014 · 33rd ACM SIGACT-SIGOPS Symposium on Principles of Distributed Computing, Paris, France, July 2014 · doi:10.1145/2611462.2611467
By prior work, there is a distributed algorithm that finds a maximal fractional matching (maximal edge packing) in O(Δ) rounds, where Δ is the maximum degree of the graph. We show that this is optimal: there is no distributed algorithm that finds a maximal fractional matching in o(Δ) rounds.
Our work gives the first linear-in-Δ lower bound for a natural graph problem in the standard model of distributed computing—prior lower bounds for a wide range of graph problems have been at best logarithmic in Δ.
Magnús Halldórsson and Shlomi Dolev (Eds.): PODC’14, Proceedings of the 2014 ACM Symposium on Principles of Distributed Computing, July 15–18, 2014, Paris, France, pages 86–95, ACM Press, New York, 2014
ISBN 978-1-4503-2944-6