Lazy Flooding:A New Technique for Information Dissemination in Distributed Network Systems

Flooding is a commonly used technique for network resource and topology information dissemination in the data communication networks. However, due to the well-known N-squared problem, it causes network congestion. We propose a new flooding technique, called lazy flooding; it floods only when links reach a certain status. It significantly cuts down the number of floods and thus reduces the data communication network congestion. On the other hand, it has negligible effect on network performance.