Dissemination of information in communication networks

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Due to advancements in hardware technologies like VLSI in the early 1980s, interest in parallel and distributed computing surged, leading to significant studies in parallel algorithms and architectures by the late 1980s. To educate both students and educators, several texts on parallel computing emerged, including a pivotal textbook in 1992 that contributed to the understanding of parallel architectures and algorithms. However, in recent years, the focus has shifted from designing parallel algorithms and costly parallel computers to the new reality of interconnected computers that collaborate, often asynchronously, to address various tasks. Communication has become a central theme in computer science for several reasons: first, the high performance of modern computers often makes communication more time-consuming than processing, making communication channel capacity a bottleneck for many distributed algorithms; second, numerous Internet tasks are purely communicative, prioritizing the quick and cost-effective execution of information over computation. Additionally, rather than relying on a central database, knowledge is now distributed across the local memories of numerous computers. This growing significance of addressing pure communication tasks in our interconnected world serves as the primary motivation for this exploration.