Information dissemination in a network

This paper addresses the process of information dissemination in a network whereby a message, originated at a node, is transmitted to all other nodes of the network. We restrict our attention to a speccial type of dissemination process,called 'local broadcasting', where a vertex can either transmit or receive a message and an informed vertex can transmit it to only one of its neighbors at a time. Based on the recently published results for a tree by Koh and Tcha, this paper proposes an efficient heuristic which determines the call sequence at each vertex node under both minimax and minisum criteria. Computational experiments with this heuristic are conducted on a variety of networks of medium size.