Distributed Cooperation Problems: Models and Definitions

Formulating suitable models of cooperative computation goes hand in hand with the study of algorithms and their efficiency. In this chapter we formalize the modeling framework used in the sequel to study problems of cooperative task execution in distributed environments under several ad- versarial settings. The framework includes abstract models of computation, definitions of adversity, the problem of distributed cooperation, viz. the Do-All problem, and the complexity measures used to evaluate the efficiency of algorithms solving the Do-All problems in various settings and to establish the corresponding lower bounds.