Efficient Information Dissemination in Dynamic Networks

Abstract

Dynamic network is the abstraction of networks with frequent topology changes arising from node mobility or other reasons. With the model of dynamic network, distributed computation problems can be formally studied with rigorous correctness. Information dissemination is one of such problems and it has received much attention recently. However, existing works focus on the time cost of dissemination, i.e. how fast the information can be disseminated to all nodes, and communication cost has been largely ignored. Our work focuses on high communication efficiency in information dissemination with correctness property guaranteed. We achieve this by making use of cluster-based hierarchy. Clustering has been widely studied and used in wireless networks to reduce communication cost. However, to the best of our knowledge, it has never been considered in the study of dynamic networks. In this paper, we firstly propose a dynamic network model, named (T, L)-HiNet, to extend existing dynamic network model with clusters. (T, L)-HiNet includes several properties defining the dynamics of cluster hierarchy in a dynamic network. Base on (T, L)-HiNet, we design hierarchical information dissemination algorithms for different scenarios of dynamics. The correctness of our algorithms is proved and the performance is analyzed. Compared with the algorithm recently proposed by Kuhn, Lynch and Oshman [7], our design can significantly reduce communication and our objective is fully achieved.