Parallel rotor walks on finite graphs and applications in discrete load balancing

Abstract

We study the parallel rotor walk process, which works as follows: Consider a graph along with an arbitrary distribution of tokens over its nodes. Every node is equipped with a rotor that points to its neighbours in a fixed circular order. In each round, every node distributes all of its tokens using the rotor. One token is allocated to the neighbour pointed at by the rotor, then the rotor moves to the subsequent neighbour, and so on, until no token remains. The process can be considered as a deterministic analogue of a process in which tokens perform one independent random walk step in each round. We compare the distribution of tokens in the rotor walk process with expected distribution in the random walk model. The similarity between the two processes is measured by their discrepancy, which is the maximum difference between the corresponding distribution entries over all rounds and nodes. We analyze a lazy variation of rotor walks that simulates a random walk with loop probability of 1/2 on each node, and each node sends not all its tokens, but every other token in each round. Viewing the rotor walk as a load balancing process, we prove that the rotor walk falls in the class of bounded-error diffusion processes introduced in [11]. This gives us discrepancy bounds of O(log3/2 n) and O(1) for hypercube and r-dimensional torus with r=O(1), respectively, which improve over the best existing bounds of O(log2 n) and O(n1/r). Also, as a result of switching to the load balancing view, we observe that the existing load balancing results can be translated to rotor walk discrepancy bounds not previously noticed in the rotor walk literature. We also use the idea of rotor walks to propose and analyze a randomized rounding discrete load balancing process that achieves the same balancing quality as similar protocols [11, 3], but uses fewer number of random bits compared to [3], and avoids the negative load problem of [11].