Efficient simulation of synchronous systems by multi-speed systems

¹ Institute of Computer Science, Wrocław University, Przesmyckiego 20, PL-51-151 Wrocław, Poland.
² Institute of Mathematics and Computer Science, Kassel University, Heinrich-Plett-Str. 40, D-34132 Kassel, Germany.
³ Institute of Mathematics, Wrocław University of Technology, Wybrzeże Wyspiańskiego 27, PL-50-370 Wrocław, Poland.

Received: November 2002
Accepted: September 2004

Abstract

We consider systems consisting of finite automata communicating by exchanging messages and working on the same read-only data. We investigate the situation in which the automata work with constant but different speeds. We assume furthermore that the automata are not aware of the speeds and they cannot measure them directly. Nevertheless, the automata have to compute a correct output. We call this model multi-speed systems of finite automata. Complexity measure that we consider here is the number of messages sent by the automata. The main result of this paper is that multi-speed systems are as powerful as synchronous systems, in which all automata work with the same speed.