The Communication Cost of Information Spreading in Dynamic Networks

This paper investigates the message complexity of distributed information spreading in adversarial dynamic networks. While distributed computations in dynamic networks have been studied intensively over the last years, almost all of the existing work solely focuses on the time complexity of distributed algorithms. In information spreading, the goal is to spread k tokens of information to every node on an n-node network. We consider the amortized (average) message complexity of spreading a token, assuming that the number of tokens is large. In a static network, this basic problem can be solved using (asymptotically optimal) O(n) amortized messages per token. Our focus is on token-forwarding algorithms, which do not manipulate tokens in any way other than storing, copying, and forwarding them. We present two sets of results depending on how nodes send messages to their neighbors: 1. Local broadcast: We show a tight lower bound of Ω̃(n
²
) on the number of amortized local broadcasts, which is matched by the naive flooding algorithm. The lower bound holds for randomized algorithms against a strongly adaptive adversary. 2. Unicast: We study the message complexity as a function of the number of dynamic changes in the network. To facilitate this, we introduce adversary-competitive message complexity as a natural complexity measure for analyzing dynamic networks: The adversary pays a unit cost for every topological change and the message cost of an algorithm is determined as the actual number of messages sent minus the total cost of the adversary. Under this model, we give a deterministic algorithm that obtains an optimal amortized message complexity of O(n) if the number of tokens k is sufficiently large. We also present a randomized algorithm that achieves subquadratic amortized message complexity for much smaller k under an oblivious adversary.