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.