Everyone Knows that Everyone Knows: Gossip Protocols for Super Experts

TL;DR

This paper studies advanced gossip protocols where agents aim to know that all others are experts, exploring conditions for protocol termination and efficiency in both synchronous and asynchronous settings.

Contribution

It introduces protocols where agents know that all are experts, analyzes their termination conditions, and compares efficiency with protocols where agents are engaged.

Findings

Protocols can terminate faster when agents are engaged.

Knowledge conditions influence protocol termination.

Both synchronous and asynchronous cases are analyzed.

Abstract

A gossip protocol is a procedure for sharing secrets in a network. The basic action in a gossip protocol is a pairwise message exchange (telephone call) wherein the calling agents exchange all the secrets they know. An agent who knows all secrets is an expert. The usual termination condition is that all agents are experts. Instead, we explore protocols wherein the termination condition is that all agents know that all agents are experts. We call such agents super experts. We also investigate gossip protocols that are common knowledge among the agents. Additionally, we model that agents who are super experts do not make and do not answer calls, and that this is common knowledge. We investigate conditions under which protocols terminate, both in the synchronous case, where there is a global clock, and in the asynchronous case, where there is not. We show that a commonly known protocol with engaged agents may terminate faster than the same commonly known protocol without engaged agents.