Searching for a Black Hole in Tree Networks

A black hole is a highly harmful stationary process residing in a node of a network and destroying all mobile agents visiting the node, without leaving any trace. We consider the task of locating a black hole in a (partially) synchronous tree network, assuming an upper bound on the time of any edge traversal by an agent. The minimum number of agents capable to identify a black hole is two. For a given tree and given starting node we are interested in the fastest possible black hole search by two agents. For arbitrary trees we give a 5/3-approximation algorithm for this problem. We give optimal black hole search algorithms for two “extreme” classes of trees: the class of lines and the class of trees in which any internal node (including the root which is the starting node) has at least 2 children.