Broadcast Gossip Averaging: Interference and Unbiasedness in Large Abelian Cayley Networks

In this paper, we study two related iterative randomized algorithms for distributed computation of averages. The first algorithm is the Broadcast Gossip Algorithm, in which at each iteration one randomly selected node broadcasts its own state to its neighbors. The second algorithm is a novel variation of the former, in which at each iteration every node is allowed to broadcast: hence, this algorithm, which we call Collision Broadcast Gossip Algorithm (CBGA), is affected by interference among messages. The performance of both algorithms is evaluated in terms of rate of convergence and asymptotical error: focusing on large Abelian Cayley networks, we highlight the role of topology and of design parameters. We show that on fully connected graphs the rate of convergence is bounded away from one, whereas the asymptotical error is bounded away from zero. On the contrary, on sparse graphs the rate of convergence goes to one and the asymptotical error goes to zero, as the size of the network grows larger. Our results also show that the performance of the CBGA is close to the performance of the BGA: this indicates the robustness of broadcast gossip algorithms to interferences.