The Dissemination of Time-Varying Information over Networked Agents with Gossiping

We consider information dissemination over a network of gossiping agents (nodes). In this model, a source keeps the most up-to-date information about a time-varying binary state of the world, and n receiver nodes want to follow the information at the source as accurately as possible. When the information at the source changes, the source first sends updates to a subset of m≤n nodes. After that, the nodes share their local information during the gossiping period to disseminate the information further. The nodes then estimate the information at the source using the majority rule at the end of the gossiping period. To analyze information dissemination, we introduce a new error metric to find the average percentage of nodes that can accurately obtain the most up-to-date information at the source. We characterize the equations necessary to obtain the steady-state distribution for the average error. Through numerical results, we first show that when the source's transmission capacity m is limited, gossiping can be harmful as it causes incorrect information to disseminate. We then find the optimal gossip rates to minimize the average error for a fixed m.