Question: Routing in Networks with Frequently Changing Topology [GaB81], [BeT89]. In some situations (e.g., mobile packet radio networks) topological changes are so frequent that topology broadcast algorithms are somewhat impractical. The algorithms of this problem are designed to cope with situations of this type. Consider a connected undirected graph with a special node referred to as the destination. Consider the collection C of directed acyclic graphs obtained by assigning a unique direction to each of the undirected links. A graph G in C is said to be rooted at the destination if for every node there is a directed path in G starting at the node and ending at the destination. Show that the following two distributed asynchronous algorithms will yield a graph in C that is rooted at the destination starting from any other graph in C.
Algorithm A: A node other than the destination with no outgoing links reverses the direction of all its adjacent links. (This is done repeatedly until every node other than the destination has an outgoing link.)
Algorithm B: Every node i other than the destination keeps a list of its neighboring nodes j that have reversed the direction of the corresponding links (i, j). At each iteration, each node i that has no outgoing link reverses the directions of the links (i, j), for all j that do not appear on its list, and empties the list. If no such j exists (i.e., the list is full), node i reverses the directions of all incoming links and empties the list. Initially, all lists are empty.
Hint: For algorithm A, assign to each node a distinct number. With each set of node numbers, associate the graph in C where each link is directed from a higher to a lower number. Consider an algorithm where each node reverses link directions by changing its number. Use a similar idea for algorithm B.