Efficient and reliable broadcast is achievable in an eventually connected network(Extended Abstract)

  • Authors:

  • Baruch Awerbuch;Shimon Even

  • Affiliations:

  • -;-

  • Venue:
  • PODC '84 Proceedings of the third annual ACM symposium on Principles of distributed computing
  • Year:
  • 1984

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Abstract

We deal with communication networks whose topology changes arbitrarily subject to the restriction that no edge-cut in the network persists forever. Up to now, no formal-ground rules have been proposed for such networks, and no protocol has been proved to possess any desirable property. We introduce a new proof methodology, in the sense that link-behavior in such networks is axiomatized. Our methodology is exemplified on broadcast protocols. A reliable broadcast protocol must deliver copies of a message to all nodes in a communication network, in finite time and in the correct order. No existing broadcast protocol with a reasonable cost is reliable, and in fact, one is inclined to believe that a communication protocol cannot be reliable, unless it knows in advances which links will fail in the future, or sends the information along all links. However, we present a new broadcast protocol which does achieve reliability with minimum cost. Moreover, in stable networks, minimum delay is achieved, too. As a by-product, we achieve a new reliable routing protocol. The main idea of our protocol is to perform the broadcast along a dynamic tree, such that the father of each node is the neighbor which has received the maximum number of messages. This guarantees that the tree will eventually reconnect each sub-network to its complement.