More than two decades ago, combinatorial topology was shown to be useful for analyzing distributed fault-tolerant algorithms in shared memory systems and in message passing systems. In this work, we show that combinatorial topology can also be useful for analyzing distributed algorithms in failure-free networks of arbitrary structure. To illustrate this, we analyze consensus, set-agreement, and approximate agreement in networks, and derive lower bounds for these problems under classical computational settings, such as the LOCAL model and dynamic networks.
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