The cooperative data exchange problem is studied for the fully connected
network. In this problem, each node initially only possesses a subset of the
K packets making up the file. Nodes make broadcast transmissions that are
received by all other nodes. The goal is for each node to recover the full
file. In this paper, we present a polynomial-time deterministic algorithm to
compute the optimal (i.e., minimal) number of required broadcast transmissions
and to determine the precise transmissions to be made by the nodes. A
particular feature of our approach is that {\it each} of the K−d
transmissions is a linear combination of {\it exactly} d+1 packets, and we
show how to optimally choose the value of d. We also show how the
coefficients of these linear combinations can be chosen by leveraging a
connection to Maximum Distance Separable (MDS) codes. Moreover, we show that
our method can be used to solve cooperative data exchange problems with
weighted cost as well as the so-called successive local omniscience problem.Comment: 21 pages, 1 figur
