FAULT-TOLERANT BROADCASTING AND GOSSIPING IN COMMUNICATION NETWORK
ABSTRACT
Broadcasting and gossiping are fundamental tasks in network communication. In broadcasting, or one-to-all communication, information originally held in one node of the network (called the source) must be transmitted to all other nodes. In gossiping, or all-to-all communication, every node holds a message which has to be transmitted to all other nodes. As communication networks grow in size, they become increasingly vulnerable to component failures. Thus, capabilities for fault-tolerant broadcasting and gossiping gain importance. The present paper is a survey of the fast-growing area of research investigating these capabilities. We focus on two most important efficiency measures of broadcasting and gossiping algorithms: running time and number of elementary transmissions required by the communication process. We emphasize the unifying thread in most results from the research in fault-tolerant communication: the trade-offs between efficiency of communication schemes and their fault-tolerance.
CHAPTER ONE
INTRODUCTION
1.1 BACKGROUND OF THE RESEARCH
This research is mostly concerned with two fundamental tasks in network communication: broadcasting and gossiping. They both aim at disseminating information among nodes. In broadcasting, also called one-to-all communication, information originally held in one node of the network (called the source) has to be transmitted to all other nodes. In gossiping, or all-to-all communication, every node holds a message (value) which must be transmitted to all other nodes. These types of network communication often occur in distributed computing, e.g., in global processor synchronization and updating distributed databases. Moreover, such communication tasks are implicit in many parallel computation problems, where data and results are distributed among processors. This happens, e.g., in matrix multiplication, parallel solving of linear systems, parallel computing of Discrete Fourier Transform, or parallel sorting As communication networks grow in size, they become increasingly vulnerable to component failures. Some links and/or nodes of the network may fail. It becomes important to design communication algorithms in such a way that the desired communication task be accomplished efficiently in spite of these faults, usually without knowing their location ahead of time.
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