We consider a natural network diffusion process, modeling the spread of information or infectious diseases. Multiple mobile agents perform independent simple random walks on an n-vertex connected graph G. The number of agents is linear in n and the walks start from the stationary distribution. Initially, a single vertex has a piece of information (or a virus). An agent becomes informed (or infected) the first time it visits some vertex with the information (or virus); thereafter, the agent informs (infects) all vertices it visits. Giakkoupis et al. [George Giakkoupis et al., 2019] have shown that the spreading time, i.e., the time before all vertices are informed, is asymptotically and w.h.p. the same as in the well-studied randomized rumor spreading process, on any d-regular graph with d = Ω(log n). The case of sub-logarithmic degree was left open, and is the main focus of this paper. First, we observe that the equivalence shown in [George Giakkoupis et al., 2019] does not hold for small d: We give an example of a 3-regular graph with logarithmic diameter for which the expected spreading time is Ω(log² n/log log n), whereas randomized rumor spreading is completed in time Θ(log n), w.h.p. Next, we show a general upper bound of Õ(d ⋅ diam(G) + log³ n /d), w.h.p., for the spreading time on any d-regular graph. We also provide a version of the bound based on the average degree, for non-regular graphs. Next, we give tight analyses for specific graph families. We show that the spreading time is O(log n), w.h.p., for constant-degree regular expanders. For the binary tree, we show an upper bound of O(log n⋅ log log n), w.h.p., and prove that this is tight, by giving a matching lower bound for the cover time of the tree by n random walks. Finally, we show a bound of O(diam(G)), w.h.p., for k-dimensional grids (k ≥ 1 is constant), by adapting a technique by Kesten and Sidoravicius [Kesten and Sidoravicius, 2003; Kesten and Sidoravicius, 2005].
@InProceedings{giakkoupis_et_al:LIPIcs.DISC.2020.9, author = {Giakkoupis, George and Saribekyan, Hayk and Sauerwald, Thomas}, title = {{Spread of Information and Diseases via Random Walks in Sparse Graphs}}, booktitle = {34th International Symposium on Distributed Computing (DISC 2020)}, pages = {9:1--9:17}, series = {Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs)}, ISBN = {978-3-95977-168-9}, ISSN = {1868-8969}, year = {2020}, volume = {179}, editor = {Attiya, Hagit}, publisher = {Schloss Dagstuhl -- Leibniz-Zentrum f{\"u}r Informatik}, address = {Dagstuhl, Germany}, URL = {https://drops.dagstuhl.de/entities/document/10.4230/LIPIcs.DISC.2020.9}, URN = {urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-130873}, doi = {10.4230/LIPIcs.DISC.2020.9}, annote = {Keywords: parallel random walks, information dissemination, infectious diseases} }
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