AbstractMany researchers in the area of distributed networks have found it convenient to assume the existence of a facility for routing broadcast messages to all the nodes in the network. We are investigating an approach called center‐based forwarding which routes messages via the branches of the shortest‐path tree for some node near the center of the network. In this article we show that this approach results in broadcasts that finish with low delay; we then explain how to construct centered trees in a loosely coupled network environment.