Rumor Spreading in Random Evolving Graphs

Abstract: Randomized gossip is one of the most popular way of disseminating information in large scale networks. This method is appreciated for its simplicity, robustness, and efficiency. In the "push" protocol, every informed node selects, at every time step (a.k.a. round), one of its neighboring node uniformly at random and forwards the information to this node. This protocol is known to complete information spreading in $O(\log n)$ time steps with high probability (w.h.p.) in several families of $n$-node "static" networks. The Push protocol has also been empirically shown to perform well in practice, and, specifically, to be robust against dynamic topological changes. In this paper, we aim at analyzing the Push protocol in "dynamic" networks. We consider the "edge-Markovian" evolving graph model which captures natural temporal dependencies between the structure of the network at time $t$, and the one at time $t+1$. Precisely, a non-edge appears with probability $p$, while an existing edge dies with probability $q$. In order to fit with real-world traces, we mostly concentrate our study on the case where $p=\Omega(1/n)$ and $q$ is constant. We prove that, in this realistic scenario, the Push protocol does perform well, completing information spreading in $O(\log n)$ time steps w.h.p. Note that this performance holds even when the network is, w.h.p., disconnected at every time step (e.g., when $p << (\log n) / n$). Our result provides the first formal argument demonstrating the robustness of the Push protocol against network changes. We also address other ranges of parameters $p$ and $q$ (e.g., $p+q=1$ with arbitrary $p$ and $q$, and $p=1/n$ with arbitrary $q$). Although they do not precisely fit with the measures performed on real-world traces, they can be of independent interest for other settings. The results in these cases confirm the positive impact of dynamism.