Bounds on the Cover Time of Parallel Rotor Walks

The rotor-router mechanism was introduced as a deterministic alternative to the random walk in undirected graphs. In this model, a set of k identical walkers is deployed in parallel, starting from a chosen subset of nodes, and moving around the graph in synchronous steps. During the process, each node maintains a cyclic ordering of its outgoing arcs, and successively propagates walkers which visit it along its outgoing arcs in round-robin fashion, according to the fixed ordering. We consider the cover time of such a system, i.e., the number of steps after which each node has been visited by at least one walk, regardless of the starting locations of the walks. In the case of k=1, [Yanovski et al., 2003] and [Bampas et al., 2009] showed that a single walk achieves a cover time of exactly Theta(mD) for any n-node graph with m edges and diameter D, and that the walker eventually stabilizes to a traversal of an Eulerian circuit on the set of all directed edges of the graph. For k>1 parallel walks, no similar structural behaviour can be observed. In this work we provide tight bounds on the cover time of k parallel rotor walks in a graph. We show that this cover time is at most (mD/log(k)) and at least Theta(mD/k) for any graph, which corresponds to a speedup of between Theta(log(k)) and Theta(k) with respect to the cover time of a single walk. Both of these extremal values of speedup are achieved for some graph classes. Our results hold for up to a polynomially large number of walks, k=O(poly(n)).