This paper presents greedy gossip with eavesdropping (GGE), a novel
randomized gossip algorithm for distributed computation of the average
consensus problem. In gossip algorithms, nodes in the network randomly
communicate with their neighbors and exchange information iteratively. The
algorithms are simple and decentralized, making them attractive for wireless
network applications. In general, gossip algorithms are robust to unreliable
wireless conditions and time varying network topologies. In this paper we
introduce GGE and demonstrate that greedy updates lead to rapid convergence. We
do not require nodes to have any location information. Instead, greedy updates
are made possible by exploiting the broadcast nature of wireless
communications. During the operation of GGE, when a node decides to gossip,
instead of choosing one of its neighbors at random, it makes a greedy
selection, choosing the node which has the value most different from its own.
In order to make this selection, nodes need to know their neighbors' values.
Therefore, we assume that all transmissions are wireless broadcasts and nodes
keep track of their neighbors' values by eavesdropping on their communications.
We show that the convergence of GGE is guaranteed for connected network
topologies. We also study the rates of convergence and illustrate, through
theoretical bounds and numerical simulations, that GGE consistently outperforms
randomized gossip and performs comparably to geographic gossip on
moderate-sized random geometric graph topologies.