Gossip algorithms are widely used in modern distributed systems, with
applications ranging from sensor networks and peer-to-peer networks to mobile
vehicle networks and social networks. A tremendous research effort has been
devoted to analyzing and improving the asymptotic rate of convergence for
gossip algorithms. In this work we study finite-time convergence of
deterministic gossiping. We show that there exists a symmetric gossip algorithm
that converges in finite time if and only if the number of network nodes is a
power of two, while there always exists an asymmetric gossip algorithm with
finite-time convergence, independent of the number of nodes. For n=2m nodes,
we prove that a fastest convergence can be reached in nm=nlog2βn node
updates via symmetric gossiping. On the other hand, under asymmetric gossip
among n=2m+r nodes with 0β€r<2m, it takes at least mn+2r node
updates for achieving finite-time convergence. It is also shown that the
existence of finite-time convergent gossiping often imposes strong structural
requirements on the underlying interaction graph. Finally, we apply our results
to gossip algorithms in quantum networks, where the goal is to control the
state of a quantum system via pairwise interactions. We show that finite-time
convergence is never possible for such systems.Comment: IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking, In Pres