Streaming Communication Protocols

We define the Streaming Communication model that combines the main aspects of communication complexity and streaming. Input arrives as a stream, spread between several agents across a network. Each agent has a bounded memory, which can be updated upon receiving a new bit, or a message from another agent. We provide tight tradeoffs between the necessary resources, i.e., communication between agents and memory, for some of the canonical problems from communication complexity by proving a strong general lower bound technique. Second, we analyze the Approximate Matching problem and show that the complexity of this problem (i.e., the achievable approximation ratio) in the one-way variant of our model is strictly different both from the streaming complexity and the one-way communication complexity thereof.