Timely Gossiping with File Slicing and Network Coding

We consider a system consisting of a large network of n users and a library of files, wherein inter-user communication is established based upon gossip mechanisms. Each file is initially present at exactly one node, which is designated as the file source. The source gets updated with newer versions of the file according to an arbitrary distribution in real time, and the other users in the network wish to acquire the latest possible version of the file. We present a class of gossip protocols that achieve O(1) age at a typical node in a single-file system and O(n) age at a typical node for a given file in an n-file system. We show that file slicing and network coding based protocols fall under the presented class of protocols. Numerical evaluation results are presented to confirm the aforementioned bounds.