Paper detail

Terminating cases of flooding

Basic synchronous flooding proceeds in rounds. Given a finite undirected (network) graph $G$, a set of sources $I \subseteq G$ initiate flooding in the first round by every node in $I$ sending the same message to all of its neighbours. In each subsequent round, nodes send the message to all of their neighbours from which they did not receive the message in the previous round. Flooding terminates when no node in $G$ sends a message in a round. The question of termination has not been settled - rather, non-termination is implicitly assumed to be possible. We show that flooding terminates on every finite graph. In the case of a single source $g_0$, flooding terminates in $e$ rounds if $G$ is bipartite and $j$ rounds with $e < j \leq e+d+1$ otherwise, where $e$ and $d$ are the eccentricity of $g_0$ and diameter of $G$ respectively. For communication/broadcast to all nodes, this is asymptotically time optimal and obviates the need for construction and maintenance of spanning structures. We extend to dynamic flooding initiated in multiple rounds with possibly multiple messages. The cases where a node only sends a message to neighbours from which it did not receive {\it any} message in the previous round, and where a node sends some highest ranked message to all neighbours from which it did not receive {\it that} message in the previous round, both terminate. All these cases also hold if the network graph loses edges over time. Non-terminating cases include asynchronous flooding, flooding where messages have fixed delays at edges, cases of multiple-message flooding and cases where the network graph acquires edges over time.