Abstract:
Compound methods have been shown to be very effective in the construction of minimal
broadcast networks (mbns). Compound methods generate a large mbn by combining multiple copies
of an mbn G using the structure of another mbn H. Node deletion is also allowed in some of these
methods. The subset of connecting nodes of G has been desined as solid h-cover by Bermond,
Fraigniaud and Peters, and center node set by Weng and Ventura. This article shows that the two
concepts are equivalent. We also provide new properties for center node sets, including bounds on
the minimum size of a center node set, show how to reduce the number of center nodes of an mbn
generated by a compound method, and propose an iterative compounding algorithm that generates
the sparsest known mbns in many cases.