Timely Opportunistic Gossiping in Dense Networks

Abstract: We consider gossiping in a fully-connected wireless network consisting of $n$ nodes. The network receives Poisson updates from a source, which generates new information. The nodes gossip their available information with the neighboring nodes to maintain network timeliness. In this work, we propose two gossiping schemes, one semi-distributed and the other one fully-distributed. In the semi-distributed scheme, the freshest nodes use pilot signals to interact with the network and gossip with the full available update rate $B$. In the fully-distributed scheme, each node gossips for a fixed amount of time duration with the full update rate $B$. Both schemes achieve $O(1)$ age scaling, and the semi-distributed scheme has the best age performance for any symmetric randomized gossiping policy. We compare the results with the recently proposed ASUMAN scheme, which also gives $O(1)$ age performance, but the nodes need to be age-aware.