Information Degradation and Misinformation in Gossip Networks

TL;DR

This paper analyzes how gossip networks can reduce information age but also facilitate rapid misinformation spread, modeling degradation with Markov chains and revealing proportional relationships between misinformation and age of information.

Contribution

It introduces a Markov chain model for information degradation in gossip networks and links misinformation spread rate to age of information in different network topologies.

Findings

Gossip reduces age of information but accelerates misinformation.

Misinformation spread rate is proportional to age of information.

Model applies to fully-connected and ring networks.

Abstract

We study networks of gossiping users where a source observing a process sends updates to an underlying graph. Nodes in the graph update their neighbors randomly and nodes always accept packets that have newer information, thus attempting to minimize their age of information (AoI). We show that while gossiping reduces AoI, information can rapidly degrade in such a network. We model degradation by arbitrary discrete-time Markov chains on k states. As a packet is transmitted through the network it modifies its state according to the Markov chain. In the last section, we specialize the Markov chain to represent misinformation spread, and show that the rate of misinformation spread is proportional to the age of information in both the fully-connected graph and ring graph.