AbstractBroadcasting is an information dissemination problem in which information originating at one node of a communication network (modeled as a graph) must be transmitted to all other nodes as quickly as possible. A broadcast graph is a graph which permits broadcasting from any originator in minimum time. in this paper, we present new methods for constructing sparse broadcast graphs. Our constructions are based on graph compounding operations which are relative to vertex sets with certain properties that depend on the broadcast protocols of the graphs. We show that many previous methods for constructing sparse broadcast graphs are special cases of our methods. We demonstrate our constructions by producing new sparse broadcast graphs and by showing how many previously constructed graphs can be obtained in a systematic way.