Information dissemination via random walks in d-dimensional space

• Authors: Henry Lam;Zhenming Liu;Michael Mitzenmacher;Xiaorui Sun;Yajun Wang
• Venue: Proceedings of the twenty-third annual ACM-SIAM symposium on Discrete Algorithms
• Year: 2012

We study a natural information dissemination problem for multiple mobile agents in a bounded Euclidean space. Agents are placed uniformly at random in the d-dimensional space {-n,...,n}d at time zero, and one of the agents holds a piece of information to be disseminated. All the agents then perform independent random walks over the space, and the information is transmitted from one agent to another if the two agents are sufficiently close. We wish to bound the total time before all agents receive the information (with high probability). Our work extends Pettarin et al's work [10], which solved the problem for d ≤ 2. We present tight bounds up to polylogarithmic factors for the case d = 3. (While our results extend to higher dimensions, for space and readability considerations we provide only the case d = 3 here.) Our results show the behavior when d ≥ 3 is qualitatively different from the case d ≤ 2. In particular, as the ratio between the volume of the space and the number of agents varies, we show an interesting phase transition for three dimensions that does not occur in one or two dimensions.