BridgeFinder: Finding communication bottlenecks in distributed environments

Nodes in mobile networks are usually unevenly distributed over space. Several dense clusters of nodes are interconnected by a few nodes in sparsely occupied areas. Removing vital nodes along such bridges would partition the network and severely reduce the overall connectivity. Consequently, detecting and protecting those few vital nodes is crucial for keeping the network operational. In order to achieve this task, we present our novel approach: BridgeFinder. Most importantly, BridgeFinder allows us to calculate good estimates for global graph measures, while operating as a fully distributed algorithm and causing only very little messaging overhead. It is based on an extended gossiping protocol and is significantly faster and more precise than existing mechanisms. The results of our extensive evaluation show that BridgeFinder is indeed very effective in detecting the few crucial for the network operation nodes.