Population protocol

A population protocol is a distributed computing model formed by resource-limited mobile agents which meet in a random way according to an interaction graph. Functions are computed by updating the state of agents whenever they meet based on the previous value of the states, and the result of the computation can be read in the states of the agents once the computation has converged.

Population protocols were introduced by Dana Angluin et al. as one of the first models of computation to be fully decentralized and to involve agents with highly limited resources, e.g., those found in sensor networks. Since then, this abstract computation model found applications in robotics and chemistry.