What are applications of flooding algorithm?

- Flooding algorithm and its many other variants are used as material distributing algorithm.

- This algorithm distributes the messages to all the hosts in the entire graph. 

- This algorithm since it acts like a flood and therefore has been named so. 

- In this simple yet useful distribution or routing algorithm, every packet that a node receives is transmitted to every other outgoing link. 

This algorithm is available in many variants but in every variant the following two things are common:

1. Each node acting as receiver and transmitter.

2. Each node responsible for forwarding received message to all its neighboring nodes except the one from which the message came. 

- Thus, the messages are eventually delivered to the hosts spread across the network. 

- Flooding algorithm might have been more useful if it would have been more complex. 

- Also, then it would have been possible to avoid the duplicate messages and infinite loops that occur because of them. 

Applications of Flooding Algorithm

In this article we list some of the application of the flooding algorithm.

1. Used in computer networking

2. Used in graphics

3. These algorithms are quite useful for solving numerous mathematical problems such as the maze problems.

4. Used for solving problems in the graph theory. 

5. Used in systems which make use of bridging. 

6. Used in systems like usenet.

7. Implemented in peer – to – peer file sharing

8. Flooding algorithms are often implemented as a part of some of the routing protocols as in OSPF, DVMRP and so on. 

9. It is also used in the protocols used in the ad hoc wireless networks.

10.There is a variant of flooding algorithm called the selective flooding which is capable on addressing various issues of flooding algorithm partially by allowing the packets to be sent only in the appropriate right direction. The packets are not sent on each and every line. 

11. Another variant of the flooding algorithm called the similarity algorithm is used graph matching algorithm. 

- This variant of the flooding algorithm is quite versatile and has got an application in the schema matching. 

- Matching the contents of the two data schemas has got an important role to play in many biochemical applications, e – business and other data warehousing applications etc. 

- The similarity flooding algorithm is based on a computation that is fixed and can be used across a number of scenarios. 

- Two graphs are passed to the algorithm as the input parameters. 

- These graphs might be of catalogs, schemas or even data structures etc. 

- The algorithm then produces a mapping between the corresponding nodes of the two graphs as output. 

- It depends on the goal of the matching what subset of the mapping has to be chosen using filters. 

- After the algorithm has been executed, a human tester is expected is expected to check and verify the results. 

- The results might be adjusted by the tester if required. 

- In this method, the accuracy of the algorithm is evaluated by number of the adjustments that are necessary.

- In some cases, an accuracy metric might be used for the estimation of the labor savings that could be obtained by the users by means of this similarity flooding algorithm for obtaining a first matching pair.

- Finally, this algorithm can be deployed as an operator of very high level in a test bed that has been implemented for the management of the output mappings and the information models. 

- There are different types of matching problems and thus each type requires following a different approach. 

- For example, the relational schemas can only be matched using SQL data types.