We show that a coupling of non-colliding simple random walkers on the complete graph on n vertices can include at most n - log n walkers. This improves the only previously known upper bound of n - 2 due to Angel, Holroyd, Martin, Wilson and Winkler (Electron. Commun. Probab.18 (2013)). The proof considers couplings of i.i.d. sequences of Bernoulli random variables satisfying a similar avoidance property, for which there is separate interest.

We model the transmission of a message on the complete graph with n vertices and limited resources. The vertices of the graph represent servers that may broadcast the message at random. Each server has a random emission capital that decreases at each emission. Quantities of interest are the number of servers that receive the information before the capital of all the informed servers is exhausted and the exhaustion time. We establish limit theorems (law of large numbers, central limit theorem and large deviation principle), as n → ∞, for the proportion of informed vertices before exhaustion and for the total duration. The analysis relies on a construction of the transmission procedure as a dynamical selection of successful nodes in a Galton–Watson tree with respect to the success epochs of the coupon collector problem.