This paper presents greedy gossip with eavesdropping (GGE), a novel randomized gossip algorithm for distributed computation of the average consensus problem. In gossip algorithms, nodes in the network randomly communicate with their neighbors and exchange information iteratively. The algorithms are simple and decentralized, making them attractive for wireless network applications. In general, gossip algorithms are robust to unreliable wireless conditions and time varying network topologies. In this paper, we introduce GGE and demonstrate that greedy updates lead to rapid convergence. We do not require nodes to have any location information. Instead, greedy updates are made possible by exploiting the broadcast nature of wireless communications. During the operation of GGE, when a node decides to gossip, instead of choosing one of its neighbors at random, it makes a greedy selection, choosing the node which has the value most different from its own. In order to make this selection, nodes need to know their neighbors' values. Therefore, we assume that all transmissions are wireless broadcasts and nodes keep track of their neighbors' values by eavesdropping on their communications. We show that the convergence of GGE is guaranteed for connected network topologies. We also study the rates of convergence and illustrate, through theoretical bounds and numerical simulations, that GGE consistently outperforms randomized gossip and performs comparably to geographic gossip on moderate-sized random geometric graph topologies.
Motivated by the slow convergence of randomized gossip, introduced in @cite_0 . Geographic gossip enables information exchange over multiple hops with the assumption that nodes have the knowledge of their geographic locations and the locations of their neighbors. It has been shown that long-range information exchange improves the rate of convergence to @math for random geometric graphs. However, geographic gossip involves overhead due to localization and geographic routing. Furthermore, the network needs to provide reliable two-way transmission over many hops. Otherwise, messages which are lost in transit will result in biasing the average consensus computation.
@cite_0
2127850304 1990476939 2135241601 2161305486
Gossip algorithms have recently received significant attention, mainly because they constitute simple and robust message-passing schemes for distributed information processing over networks. However, for many topologies that are realistic for wireless ad-hoc and sensor networks (like grids and random geometric graphs), the standard nearest-neighbor gossip converges as slowly as flooding (O(n2) messages). A recently proposed algorithm called geographic gossip improves gossip efficiency by a √n factor, by exploiting geographic information to enable multihop long-distance communications. This paper proves that a variation of geographic gossip that averages along routed paths, improves efficiency by an additional √n factor, and is order optimal (O(n) messages) for grids and random geometric graphs with high probability. We develop a general technique (travel agency method) based on Markov chain mixing time inequalities which can give bounds on the performance of randomized message-passing algorithms operating over various graph topologies. The dynamic behavior of a network in which information is changing continuously over time requires robust and efficient mechanisms for keeping nodes updated about new information. Gossip protocols are mechanisms for this task in which nodes communicate with one another according to some underlying deterministic or randomized algorithm, exchanging information in each communication step. In a variety of contexts, the use of randomization to propagate information has been found to provide better reliability and scalability than more regimented deterministic approaches.In many settings, such as a cluster of distributed computing hosts, new information is generated at individual nodes, and is most "interesting" to nodes that are nearby. Thus, we propose distance-based propagation bounds as a performance measure for gossip mechanisms: a node at distance d from the origin of a new piece of information should be able to learn about this information with a delay that grows slowly with d, and is independent of the size of the network.For nodes arranged with uniform density in Euclidean space, we present natural gossip mechanisms, called spatial gossip, that satisfy such a guarantee: new information is spread to nodes at distance d, with high probability, in O(log1 + e d) time steps. Such a bound combines the desirable qualitative features of uniform gossip, in which information is spread with a delay that is logarithmic in the full network size, and deterministic flooding, in which information is spread with a delay that is linear in the distance and independent of the network size. Our mechanisms and their analysis resolve a conjecture of [1987].We further show an application of our gossip mechanisms to a basic resource location problem, in which nodes seek to rapidly learn the location of the nearest copy of a resource in a network. This problem, which is of considerable practical importance, can be solved by a very simple protocol using Spatial Gossip, whereas we can show that no protocol built on top of uniform gossip can inform nodes of their approximately nearest resource within poly-logarithmic time. The analysis relies on an additional useful property of spatial gossip, namely that information travels from its source to sinks along short paths not visiting points of the network far from the two nodes. Gossip algorithms for aggregation have recently received significant attention for sensor network applications because of their simplicity and robustness in noisy and uncertain environments. However, gossip algorithms can waste significant energy by essentially passing around redundant information multiple times. For realistic sensor network model topologies like grids and random geometric graphs, the inefficiency of gossip schemes is caused by slow mixing times of random walks on those graphs. We propose and analyze an alternative gossiping scheme that exploits geographic information. By utilizing a simple resampling method, we can demonstrate substantial gains over previously proposed gossip protocols. In particular, for random geometric graphs, our algorithm computes the true average to accuracy 1 n sup a using O(n sup 1.5 spl radic (logn)) radio transmissions, which reduces the energy consumption by a spl radic (n logn) factor over standard gossip algorithms. Motivated by applications to wireless sensor, peer-to-peer, and ad hoc networks, we study distributed broadcasting algorithms for exchanging information and computing in an arbitrarily connected network of nodes. Specifically, we study a broadcasting-based gossiping algorithm to compute the (possibly weighted) average of the initial measurements of the nodes at every node in the network. We show that the broadcast gossip algorithm converges almost surely to a consensus. We prove that the random consensus value is, in expectation, the average of initial node measurements and that it can be made arbitrarily close to this value in mean squared error sense, under a balanced connectivity model and by trading off convergence speed with accuracy of the computation. We provide theoretical and numerical results on the mean square error performance, on the convergence rate and study the effect of the ldquomixing parameterrdquo on the convergence rate of the broadcast gossip algorithm. The results indicate that the mean squared error strictly decreases through iterations until the consensus is achieved. Finally, we assess and compare the communication cost of the broadcast gossip algorithm to achieve a given distance to consensus through theoretical and numerical results.