Timely Gossiping with File Slicing and Network Coding

TL;DR

This paper introduces gossip protocols utilizing file slicing and network coding to efficiently disseminate updated files in large networks, achieving low age of information and demonstrating their effectiveness through numerical results.

Contribution

It presents a class of gossip protocols that attain optimal age bounds using file slicing and network coding, applicable to multi-file systems.

Findings

Achieves $O(1)$ age in single-file systems.

Achieves $O(n)$ age in multi-file systems.

Numerical results confirm theoretical bounds.

Abstract

We consider a system consisting of a large network of $n$ users and a library of files, wherein inter-user communication is established based upon gossip mechanisms. Each file is initially present at exactly one node, which is designated as the file \emph{source}. The source gets updated with newer versions of the file according to an arbitrary distribution in real time, and the other users in the network wish to acquire the latest possible version of the file. We present a class of gossip protocols that achieve $O(1)$ age at a typical node in a single-file system and $O(n)$ age at a typical node for a given file in an $n$-file system. We show that file slicing and network coding based protocols fall under the presented class of protocols. Numerical evaluation results are presented to confirm the aforementioned bounds.