Analysis of a gossip protocol in PRISM

Gossip, or epidemic, protocols have emerged as a powerful strategy to implement highly scalable and resilient reliable broadcast primitives. Due to scalability reasons, each participant in a gossip protocol maintains a partial view of the system. The reliability of the gossip protocol depends upon some critical properties of these views, such as degree distribution and clustering coefficient. Several algorithms have been proposed to maintain partial views for gossip protocols. In this paper, we show that under a high number of faults, these algorithms take a long time to restore the desirable view properties. To address this problem, we present HyParView, a new membership protocol to support gossip-based broadcast that ensures high levels of reliability even in the presence of high rates of node failure. The HyParView protocol is based on a novel approach that relies in the use of two distinct partial views, which are maintained with different goals by different strategies.

2008

Gossip-based protocols are simple, robust and scalable and have been consistently applied in many distributed, mostly wired, settings. Most validation in this area has been so far empirical and there is a clear lack of a theoretical counterpart clearly defining what can and cannot be computed with gossip-based protocols.

Asian Journal of Information Technology, 2019

Gossip-based protocols for group communication have attractive scalability and reliability properties. The gossip schemes studied so far typically assume that each group member has full knowledge of the global membership and chooses gossip targets uniformly at random. In this study, we present a design of a routing algorithm that has the properties of gossip style of disseminating link state updates with the intention of making it faster than the current algorithms.

2010

Gossip protocols are known to be highly robust in scenarios with high churn, but if the data that is being gossiped becomes corrupted, a protocol's very robustness can make it hard to fix the problem. All participants need to be taken down, any disk-based data needs to be scrubbed, the cause of the corruption needs to be fixed, and only then can participants be restarted. If even a single participant is skipped in this process, say because it was temporarily unreachable, then it can contaminate the entire system all over again. We describe the design and implementation of a new middleware for gossip protocols that addresses this problem. Our middleware offers the ability to update code dynamically and provides a small resilient core that allows updating code that has failed catastrophically. Our initial PlanetLab-based deployment demonstrates that the middleware is efficient.

University of California at San Diego, La …, 1999

Rumor mongering (also known as gossip) is an epidemiological protocol that implements broadcasting with a reliability that can be very high. Rumor mongering is attractive because it is generic, scalable, adapts well to failures and recoveries, and has a reliability that gracefully degrades with the numb e r o f f a i l u r e s i n a r u n. However, rumor mongering uses random selection for communications. We study the impact of using random selection in this paper. We present a protocol that super cially resembles rumor mongering but is deterministic. We show that this new protocol has most of the same attractions as rumor mongering. The one attraction that rumor mongering has|namely graceful degradation|comes at a high cost in terms of the number of messages sent. We compare the two approaches both at an abstract level and in terms of how they perform in an Ethernet and small wide area network of Ethernets.

2010

We consider the problem of propagating an update to nodes in a distributed system using two gossiping protocols. The first is an idealized algorithm with static and dynamic knowledge of the system, and the second is a simple randomized algorithm. We construct a theoretical model that allows us to derive work and completion time statistics under varying transmission delay distributions. Numerical results are obtained for both exponential and nonexponential transmission times using linear-algebraic queueing theory techniques. Additionally, we present the results of simulation experiments showing that under node churn assumptions, the randomized algorithm's performance is qualitatively different than in a fault-free system.

Dependable Computing—EDCC-3, 1999

A reliable multicast protocol ensures that all of the intended recipients of a message m that do not fail eventually deliver m. For example, consider the reliable multicast protocol of [11], and consider a message m, sent by process p1, that is intended to be delivered by p1, p2, and ...

QEST, 2011

We present an analytical framework for gossip protocols based on the pair wise information exchange between interacting nodes. This framework allows for studying the impact of protocol parameters on the performance of the protocol. Previously, gossip-based information dissemination protocols have been analyzed under the assumption of perfect, lossless communication channels. We extend our framework for the analysis of networks with lossy channels. We show how the presence of message loss, coupled with specific topology configurations, impacts the expected behavior of the protocol. We validate the obtained models against simulations for two protocols.

1998

We present a model checking technique for LRT, a temporal logic for communicating sequential agents (CSAs) introduced by Lodaya, Ramanujam, and Thiagarajan. LRT contains temporal modalities indexed with a local point of view of one agent and allows to refer to properties of other agents according to the latest gossip which is related to local knowledge. The model checking procedure relies on a modularisation of LRT into temporal and gossip modalities. We introduce a hierarchy of formulae and a corresponding hierarchy of equivalences, which allows to compute for each formula and finite state distributed system a finite multi modal Kripke structure, on which the formula can be checked with standard techniques.

SIMULATION, 2014

Gossip-based Wireless Sensor Networks (GWSN) are complex systems of inherently random nature. Planning and designing GWSN requires a fast and adequately accurate mechanism to estimate system performance. As a first contribution, we propose a performance analysis technique that simulates the gossip-based propagation of each single piece of data in isolation. This technique applies to GWSN in which the dissemination of data from a specific sensor does not depend on dissemination of data generated by other sensors. We model the dissemination of a piece of data with a Stochastic-Variable Graph Model (SVGM). SVGM is a weighted graph abstraction in which the edges represent stochastic variables that model propagation delays between neighboring nodes. Latency and reliability performance properties are obtained efficiently through a stochastic shortest path analysis on the SVGM model using Monte Carlo (MC) simulation. The method is accurate and fast, applicable for both partial and complete system analysis. It outperforms traditional discreteevent simulation. As a second contribution, we propose a centrality-based stratification method that combines structural network analysis and MC partial simulation, to further increase efficiency of the system-level analysis while maintaining adequate accuracy. We analyzed the proposed performance evaluation techniques through an extensive set of experiments, using a real deployment and simulations at different levels of abstraction.