In this paper, we study the question of how efficiently a collection of interconnected nodes can perform a global computation in the GOSSIP model of communication. In this model, nodes do not know the global topology of the network, and they may only initiate contact with a single neighbor in each round. This model contrasts with the much less restrictive LOCAL model, where a node may simultaneously communicate with all of its neighbors in a single round. A basic question in this setting is how many rounds of communication are required for the information dissemination problem, in which each node has some piece of information and is required to collect all others. In the LOCAL model, this is quite simple: each node broadcasts all of its information in each round, and the number of rounds required will be equal to the diameter of the underlying communication graph. In the GOSSIP model, each node must independently choose a single neighbor to contact, and the lack of global information makes it difficult to make any sort of principled choice. As such, researchers have focused on the uniform gossip algorithm, in which each node independently selects a neighbor uniformly at random. When the graph is well-connected, this works quite well. In a string of beautiful papers, researchers proved a sequence of successively stronger bounds on the number of rounds required in terms of the conductance φ and graph size n, culminating in a bound of O(φ −1 log n). In this paper, we show that a fairly simple modification of the protocol gives an algorithm that solves the information dissemination problem in at most O(D + polylog(n)) rounds in a network of diameter D, with no dependence on the conductance. This is at most an additive polylogarithmic factor from the trivial lower bound of D, which applies even in the LOCAL model. In fact, we prove that something stronger is true: any algorithm * This work was partially supported by the Simons Postdoctoral Fellows Program and NSF grant CCF-0843915. Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. To copy otherwise, to republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. that requires T rounds in the LOCAL model can be simulated in O(T +polylog(n)) rounds in the GOSSIP model. We thus prove that these two models of distributed computation are essentially equivalent.
Finally, it was proved in REF that a simple modification of the Push&Pull algorithm gives a solution for rumor spreading with time complexity of at most O(D + poly log n), where D is the diameter of the network, hence, with no dependence on the conductance.
Global computation in a poorly connected world: fast rumor spreading with no dependence on conductance
STOC '12
Computer Science Physics Mathematics