Hierarchical message dissemination in very large WANs

A hierarchical broadcasting technique in very large arbitrary networks which achieves near optimal cost and time measures is proposed. The network is partitioned into hierarchical clusters which are interconnected with each other through gate nodes. The approach is based on using a fully distributed minimum spanning tree algorithm within the gate-node network while achieving time optimal broadcasting within the local clusters by formulating the problem as finding maximum matching in constrained bipartite graphs. Extensive simulation results are presented which show the tradeoff between the two conflicting performance criteria.<>