On the radius of nonsplit graphs and information dissemination in dynamic networks

Abstract

A nonsplit graph is a directed graph where each pair of nodes has a common incoming neighbor. We show that the radius of such graphs is in $O(loglogn)$, where $n$ is the number of nodes. This is an exponential improvement on the previously best known upper bound of $O(logn)$. We then generalize the result to products of nonsplit graphs.

The analysis of nonsplit graph products has direct implications in the context of distributed systems, where processes operate in rounds and communicate via message passing in each round: communication graphs in several distributed systems naturally relate to nonsplit graphs and the graph product concisely represents relaying messages in such networks. Applying our results, we obtain improved bounds on the dynamic radius of such networks, i.e., the maximum number of rounds until all processes have received a message from a common process, if all processes relay messages in each round. We finally connect the dynamic radius to lower bounds for achieving consensus in dynamic networks.