Recent Developments in Firing Squad Synchronization Algorithms: Smaller Solutions

Abstract

Synchronizing large scale networks is an important and fundamental computing primitive in parallel and distributed systems. The synchronization in cellular automata has been known as the firing squad synchronization problem (FSSP). The FSSP has been studied extensively for more than forty years, and a rich variety of synchronization algorithms have been proposed so far. In the present paper, we construct a survey on recent developments in FSSP algorithms for not only one-dimensional but two-dimensional, even multi-dimensional cellular automata, focusing on smaller solutions to the FSSP.