A Tight Lower Bound for Streett Complementation

Finite automata on infinite words (omega-automata) proved to be a powerful weapon for modeling and reasoning infinite behaviors of reactive systems. Complementation of omega-automata is crucial in many of these applications. But the problem is non-trivial; even after extensive study during the past two decades, we still have an important type of omega-automata, namely Streett automata, for which the gap between the current best lower bound 2^(Omega(n lg nk)) and upper bound 2^(O (nk lg nk)) is substantial, for the Streett index size k can be exponential in the number of states n. In a previous work we showed a construction for complementing Streett automata with the upper bound 2^(O(n lg n+nk lg k)) for k = O(n) and 2^(O(n^2 lg n)) for k = omega(n). In this paper we establish a matching lower bound 2^(Omega (n lg n+nk lg k)) for k = O(n) and 2^(Omega (n^2 lg n)) for k = omega(n), and therefore showing that the construction is asymptotically optimal with respect to the ^(Theta(.)) notation.