Firefly Synchronization with Asynchronous Wake-up

This paper considers biologically-inspired synchronization algorithms for a model with primitive communication and asynchronous wake-up. Existing averaging-style algorithms for synchronization implicitly require a coherent round structure to guarantee convergence. We argue that this assumption is too strong in a distributed setting, and thus investigate the synchronization problem assuming nodes wake up asynchronously. Our preliminary results show that, under some assumptions, it is possible to approximate the properties of a coherent round structure given asynchronous wake-up, and leverage this observation to achieve synchronization in this setting. Achieving general solutions remains an interesting open question.