# Age of Information in Gossip Networks: A Friendly Introduction and Literature Survey

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2312.16163 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.16163/

## Key facts

- Cited by 5 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 26 Dec 2023.

## Built on by (most cited first, 5 of 5)

- ["X of Information'' Continuum: A Survey on AI-Driven Multi-dimensional Metrics for Next-Generation Networked Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.19657/) (2025)
- [Distributed Mixture-of-Agents for Edge Inference with Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.21200/) (2024)
- [Scale-Robust Timely Asynchronous Decentralized Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.19749/) (2024)
- [A Survey of Freshness-Aware Wireless Networking with Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.21412/) (2025)
- [Managing Context and Communication in Distributed Agentic UAV Swarms](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.01569/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Gossiping is a communication mechanism, used for fast information dissemination in a network, where each node of the network randomly shares its information with the neighboring nodes. To characterize the notion of fastness in the context of gossip networks, age of information (AoI) is used as a timeliness metric. In this article, we summarize the recent works related to timely gossiping in a network. We start with the introduction of randomized gossip algorithms as an epidemic algorithm for database maintenance, and how the gossiping literature was later developed in the context of rumor spreading, message passing and distributed mean estimation. Then, we motivate the need for timely gossiping in applications such as source tracking and decentralized learning. We evaluate timeliness scaling of gossiping in various network topologies, such as, fully connected, ring, grid, generalized ring, hierarchical, and sparse asymmetric networks. We discuss age-aware gossiping and the higher order moments of the age process. We also consider different variations of gossiping in networks, such as, file slicing and network coding, reliable and unreliable sources, information mutation, different adversarial actions in gossiping, and energy harvesting sensors. Finally, we conclude this article with a few open problems and future directions in timely gossiping.