INFORMATION DISSEMINATION IN TREES WITH NONUNIFORM EDGE TRANSMISSION TIMES

Abstract

This paper is concerned with the information dissemination process in a tree. It is assumed that a vertex can either transmit or receive a message and an informed vertex can transmit it to only one of its neighbors at a time. For the case of uniform edge transmission times, Slater et al. [4] showed that a simple ordering policy achieves the minimum broadcast time and presented an algorithm which determines a set of broadcast centers. We show that a simple ordering policy is still optimal for the case of nonuniform edge transmission times and suggest modifications of the algorithm which enables it to solve this general problem within O(N log N) time.