Maintaining Bipartite Matchings in the Presence of Failures

We present an on-line distributed reconfiguration algorithm for finding a new maximum matching incrementally after some nodes have failed. Our algorithm is deadlock-free and, with k failures, maintains at least M k matching pairs during the reconfiguration process, where M is the size of the original maximum matching. The algorithm tolerates failures that occur during reconfiguration. The worst-case reconfiguration time is O(k min(lAl,161)) after kfailures, whereA and 6 are the node sets, but simulations show that the average-case reconfiguration time is much better. The algorithm is also simple enough to be implemented in hardware.