An efficient broadcast protocol in networks with changing topologies

The authors study the problem of broadcasting a message to all the nodes in a network with changing topologies. A broadcast protocol is said to be reliable if every node can receive the message in finite time. Previous results show that reliable protocols are possible if the network is eventually connected and each node has an infinite message buffer space. The authors present a two-phase protocol which consists of the broadcast phase and the reply phase. The protocol is proved to be reliable and have minimum broadcast delay. Furthermore, it is shown that the protocol needs only bounded message buffer space if the network is eventually connected in time that is finite and bounded. The protocol also provides a dynamic buffer management scheme that is superior to other schemes, such as the static policy and forced-out policy. This can greatly simplify buffer allocation problems in communication networks