Construction of centered shortest-path trees in networks

Many researchers in the area of distributed networks have found it convenient to assume the existence of a facility for routing broadcast messages to all the nodes in the network. We are investigating an approach called center-based forwarding which routes messages via the branches of the shortest-path tree for some node near the center of the network. In this article we show that this approach results in broadcasts that finish with low delay; we then explain how to construct centered trees in a loosely coupled network environment.