Probabilistic Heuristics for Disseminating Information in Networks

We study the problem of disseminating a piece of information through all the nodes of a network, given that it is known originally only to a single node. In the absence of any structural knowledge on the network, other than the nodes' neighborhoods, this problem is traditionally solved by flooding all the network's edges. We analyze a recently introduced probabilistic algorithm for flooding and give an alternative probabilistic heuristic that can lead to some cost-effective improvements, like better trade-offs between the message and time complexities involved. We analyze the two algorithms, both mathematically and by means of simulations, always within a random-graph framework and considering relevant node-degree distributions