Broadcasting on Paths and Cycles

Abstract

Consider the following broadcasting process run on a connected graph $G=(V,E)$. Suppose that $k \ge 2$ agents start on vertices selected from $V$ uniformly and independently at random. One of the agents has a message that she wants to communicate to the other agents. All agents perform independent random walks on $G$, with the message being passed when an agent that knows the message meets an agent that does not know the message. The broadcasting time $\xi(G,k)$ is the time it takes to spread the message to all agents. We provide tight bounds for $\xi(P_n,k)$ and $\xi(C_n,k)$ that hold asymptotically almost surely for the whole range of the parameter~$k$.