Information Gathering in Ad-Hoc Radio Networks with Tree Topology

We study the problem of information gathering in ad-hoc radio networks without collision detection, focussing on the case when the network forms a tree, with edges directed towards the root. Initially, each node has a piece of information that we refer to as a rumor. Our goal is to design protocols that deliver all rumors to the root of the tree as quickly as possible. The protocol must complete this task within its allotted time even though the actual tree topology is unknown when the computation starts. In the deterministic case, assuming that the nodes are labeled with small integers, we give an O(n)-time protocol that uses unbounded messages, and an O(n log n)-time protocol using bounded messages, where any message can include only one rumor. We also consider fire-and-forward protocols, in which a node can only transmit its own rumor or the rumor received in the previous step. We give a deterministic fire-and- forward protocol with running time O(n^1.5), and we show that it is asymptotically optimal. We then study randomized algorithms where the nodes are not labelled. In this model, we give an O(n log n)-time protocol and we prove that this bound is asymptotically optimal

Lower bounds on systolic gossip

AbstractGossiping is an extensively investigated information dissemination process in which each processor has a distinct item of information and has to collect all the items possessed by the other processors. In this paper we provide an innovative and general lower bound technique relying on the novel notion of delay digraph of a gossiping protocol and on the use of matrix norm methods. Such a technique is very powerful and allows the determination of new and significantly improved lower bounds in many cases. In fact, we derive the first general lower bound on the gossiping time of systolic protocols, i.e., constituted by a periodic repetition of simple communication steps. In particular, given any network of n processors and any systolic period s, in the directed and the undirected half-duplex cases every s-systolic gossip protocol takes at least log(n)/log(1/λ)−O(loglog(n)) time steps, where λ is the unique solution between 0 and 1 of λ·p⌊s/2⌋(λ)·p⌈s/2⌉(λ)=1, with pi(λ)=1+λ2+⋯+λ2i−2 for any integer i>0. We then provide improved lower bounds in the directed and half-duplex cases for many well-known network topologies, such as Butterfly, de Bruijn, and Kautz graphs. All the results are extended also to the full-duplex case. Our technique is very general, as for s→∞ it allows the determination of improved results even for non-systolic protocols. In fact, for general networks, as a simple corollary it yields a lower bound only an O(loglog(n)) additive factor far from the general one independently proved in [Proc. 1st ACM Symposium on Parallel Algorithms and Architectures (SPAA), 1989, p. 318; Topics in Combinatorics and Graph Theory (1990) 451; SIAM Journal on Computing 21(1) (1992) 111; Discrete Applied Mathematics 42 (1993) 75] for all graphs and any (non-systolic) gossip protocol. Moreover, for specific networks, it significantly improves with respect to the previously known results, even in the full-duplex case. Correspondingly, better lower bounds on the gossiping time of non-systolic protocols are determined in the directed, half-duplex and full-duplex cases for Butterfly, de Bruijn, and Kautz graphs. Even if in this paper we give only a limited number of examples, our technique has wide applicability and gives a general framework that often allows to get improved lower bounds on the gossiping time of systolic and non-systolic protocols in the directed, half-duplex and full-duplex cases

The Total Acquisition Number of Random Geometric Graphs

Let $G$ be a graph in which each vertex initially has weight 1. In each step, the weight from a vertex $u$ to a neighbouring vertex $v$ can be moved, provided that the weight on $v$ is at least as large as the weight on $u$. The total acquisition number of $G$, denoted by $a_t(G)$, is the minimum cardinality of the set of vertices with positive weight at the end of the process. In this paper, we investigate random geometric graphs $G(n,r)$ with $n$ vertices distributed u.a.r. in $[0,\sqrt{n}]^2$ and two vertices being adjacent if and only if their distance is at most $r$. We show that asymptotically almost surely $a_t(G(n,r)) = \Theta( n / (r \lg r)^2)$ for the whole range of $r=r_n \ge 1$ such that $r \lg r \le \sqrt{n}$. By monotonicity, asymptotically almost surely $a_t(G(n,r)) = \Theta(n)$ if $r < 1$, and $a_t(G(n,r)) = \Theta(1)$ if $r \lg r > \sqrt{n}$