Information spreading in stationary Markovian evolving graphs

Markovian evolving graphs are dynamic-graph models where the links among a fixed set of nodes change during time according to an arbitrary Markovian rule. They are extremely general and they can well describe important dynamic-network scenarios. We study the speed of information spreading in the stationary phase by analyzing the completion time of the flooding mechanism. We prove a general theorem that establishes an upper bound on flooding time in any stationary Markovian evolving graph in terms of its node-expansion properties. We apply our theorem in two natural and relevant cases of such dynamic graphs. Geometric Markovian evolving graphs where the Markovian behaviour is yielded by n mobile radio stations, with fixed transmission radius, that perform independent random walks over a square region of the plane. Edge-Markovian evolving graphs where the probability of existence of any edge at time t depends on the existence (or not) of the same edge at time t-1. In both cases, the obtained upper bounds hold with high probability and they are nearly tight. In fact, they turn out to be tight for a large range of the values of the input parameters. As for geometric Markovian evolving graphs, our result represents the first analytical upper bound for flooding time on a class of concrete mobile networks. © 2006 IEEE.