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 applications to sensor, peer-to-peer, and ad hoc networks, we study distributed algorithms, also known as gossip algorithms, for exchanging information and for computing in an arbitrarily connected network of nodes. The topology of such networks changes continuously as new nodes join and old nodes leave the network. Algorithms for such networks need to be robust against changes in topology. Additionally, nodes in sensor networks operate under limited computational, communication, and energy resources. These constraints have motivated the design of "gossip" algorithms: schemes which distribute the computational burden and in which a node communicates with a randomly chosen neighbor. We analyze the averaging problem under the gossip constraint for an arbitrary network graph, and find that the averaging time of a gossip algorithm depends on the second largest eigenvalue of a doubly stochastic matrix characterizing the algorithm. Designing the fastest gossip algorithm corresponds to minimizing this eigenvalue, which is a semidefinite program (SDP). In general, SDPs cannot be solved in a distributed fashion; however, exploiting problem structure, we propose a distributed subgradient method that solves the optimization problem over the network. The relation of averaging time to the second largest eigenvalue naturally relates it to the mixing time of a random walk with transition probabilities derived from the gossip algorithm. We use this connection to study the performance and scaling of gossip algorithms on two popular networks: Wireless Sensor Networks, which are modeled as Geometric Random Graphs, and the Internet graph under the so-called Preferential Connectivity (PC) model. Abstract We consider the problem of finding a linear iteration that yields distributed averaging consensus over a network, i.e., that asymptotically computes the average of some initial values given at the nodes. When the iteration is assumed symmetric, the problem of finding the fastest converging linear iteration can be cast as a semidefinite program, and therefore efficiently and globally solved. These optimal linear iterations are often substantially faster than several common heuristics that are based on the Laplacian of the associated graph. We show how problem structure can be exploited to speed up interior-point methods for solving the fastest distributed linear iteration problem, for networks with up to a thousand or so edges. We also describe a simple subgradient method that handles far larger problems, with up to 100 000 edges. We give several extensions and variations on the basic problem.