Fault-tolerant broadcasting and gossiping in communication networks

Broadcasting and gossiping are fundamental tasks in network communication. In broadcasting, or one-to-all communication, information originally held in one node of the network (called the source) must be transmitted to all other nodes. In gossiping, or all-to-all communication, every node holds a message which has to be transmitted to all other nodes. As communication networks grow in size, they become increasingly vulnerable to component failures. Thus, capabilities for fault-tolerant broadcasting and gossiping gain importance. The present paper is a survey of the fast-growing area of research investigating these capabilities. We focus on two most important efficiency measures of broadcasting and gossiping algorithms: running time and number of elementary transmissions required by the communication process. We emphasize the unifying thread in most results from the research in fault-tolerant communication: the trade-offs between efficiency of communication schemes and their fault-tolerance.