On Termination of a Flooding Process
Walter Hussak, Amitabh Trehan · 2019
Flooding is a fundamental distributed algorithms technique. Consider the following flooding process, for simplicity, in a synchronous message passing network: A distinguished node begins the flooding process by sending the (same) message to all its neighbours in the first round. In subsequent rounds, every node receiving the message relays a copy of the message further to all those, and only those, nodes it did not receive the message from in the previous round. However, the nodes do not remember if they've taken part in the flooding before and therefore will repeat the process every time they get a message. In other words, they execute an amnesiac flooding process with memory only of the present round. The flooding process terminates in a particular round when no edge in the network carries the message in that, and, hence, subsequent, rounds. We call this process Amnesiac Flooding (AF).