Adaptive Rumor Spreading

Motivated by the recent emergence of the so-called opportunistic communication networks, we consider the issue of adaptivity in the most basic continuous time (asynchronous) rumor spreading process. In our setting a rumor has to be spread to a population; the service provider can push it at any time to any node in the network and has unit cost for doing this. On the other hand, as usual in rumor spreading, nodes share the rumor upon meeting and this imposes no cost on the service provider. Rather than fixing a budget on the number of pushes, we consider the cost version of the problem with a fixed deadline and ask for a minimum cost strategy that spreads the rumor to every node. A nonadaptive strategy can only intervene at the beginning and at the end, while an adaptive strategy has full knowledge and intervention capabilities. Our main result is that in the homogeneous case (where every pair of nodes randomly meet at the same rate) the benefit of adaptivity is bounded by a constant. This requires a subtle analysis of the underlying random process that is of interest in its own right.