Flooding Topology Algorithms for Computer Networks

Flooding topology is a subset of initial network's links, which can be used by flooding algorithms to send broadcast messages. Use of such topology can significantly reduce network load. From mathematical viewpoint flooding topology is a spanning subgraph of the initial network's graph with specific properties and constraints, such as minimal or close to the minimal number of edges, bounded vertex degree, bounded diameter and additional connectivity properties. In this paper one of the possible mathematical formulations of the flooding topology problem is introduced using graph-theoretic approach. Different parameters of the flooding topology are investigated and examples of possible tradeoffs between them are presented. Based on the introduced mathematical problem formulation several flooding topology algorithms were designed and their prototypes were created and tested on the typical network topologies, such as fat trees, Clos networks, spine-leaf topology and VL2 topology. Simulation results showed that proposed algorithms significantly reduce flooding for all considered topologies, while respecting other properties of the flooding topology in most cases.