Brief announcement: efficient flooding in power-law networks

Flooding is an effective mechanism for both broadcast and unicast modes of communication (in unstructured networks), providing broad coverage and guaranteeing minimum delay. However, flooding is not a scalable communication mechanism, mainly because of the communication overhead it imposes to the network. We use the percolation theory to formalize the main problem with flooding in the context of power-law networks, propose a remedial approach with our probabilistic flooding technique, and find the optimal operating point for probabilistic flooding rigorously, such that it improves scalability of the normal flooding by 99%.