A Performance Model of Gossip-Based Update Propagation

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 only a partial view of the system, from which they select peers to perform gossip exchanges. On the other hand the natural redundancy of gossip protocols makes them less efficient than other approaches that rely in some sort of structured overlay network. The thesis addresses gossip protocols and the problem of building partial views to support their operation. For that purpose, the thesis presents and evaluates a new scalable membership protocol, which is called HyParView, that provides a number of properties, such as degree distribution, accuracy and clustering coefficient, that are highly useful to the construction of efficient gossip protocols. The thesis also introduce two new gossip protocols, based on HyParView, that provide high reliability with small message redundancy. One is an eager push gossip protocol while the other is a tree based gossip broadcast protocol. Simulations results show that, in comparison with other existing protocols, HyParView-based gossip protocols not only provide better reliability but also support higher percentages of node failures, and are able to recover faster from these failures.

2014

Gossip protocol is one of the most scalable and reliable protocol for message dissemination in a large network where nodes joins and leaves the network frequently. In this paper we have implemented gossip protocol for message/ information dissemination using two style of epidemic information dissemination i.e. rumor mongering and anti-entropy. The membership is managed by using CYCLON membership protocol. Here we analyze the change in behavior of four performance metrics of gossip protocol which are: Average Path Length, Average Clustering Coefficient; and In-degree and average message exchange with respect to different number of nodes.

IEEE Transactions on Information Theory, 2006

Motivated by applications to sensor, peer-to-peer, and ad hoc networks, we study distributed algorithms, also known as gossip algorithms, for exchanging information and for computing in an arbitrarily connected network of nodes. The topology of such networks changes continuously as new nodes join and old nodes leave the network. Algorithms for such networks need to be robust against changes in topology. Additionally, nodes in sensor networks operate under limited computational, communication, and energy resources. These constraints have motivated the design of "gossip" algorithms: schemes which distribute the computational burden and in which a node communicates with a randomly chosen neighbor. We analyze the averaging problem under the gossip constraint for an arbitrary network graph, and find that the averaging time of a gossip algorithm depends on the second largest eigenvalue of a doubly stochastic matrix characterizing the algorithm. Designing the fastest gossip algorithm corresponds to minimizing this eigenvalue, which is a semidefinite program (SDP). In general, SDPs cannot be solved in a distributed fashion; however, exploiting problem structure, we propose a distributed subgradient method that solves the optimization problem over the network. The relation of averaging time to the second largest eigenvalue naturally relates it to the mixing time of a random walk with transition probabilities derived from the gossip algorithm. We use this connection to study the performance and scaling of gossip algorithms on two popular networks: Wireless Sensor Networks, which are modeled as Geometric Random Graphs, and the Internet graph under the so-called Preferential Connectivity (PC) model.

Computer Communications, 2011

This paper presents a rigorous analytic study of gossip-based message dissemination schemes that can be employed for content/service dissemination or discovery in unstructured and distributed networks. When using random gossiping, communication with multiple peers in one gossiping round is allowed. The algorithms studied in this paper are considered under different network conditions, depending on the knowledge of the state of the neighboring nodes in the network. Different node behaviors, with respect to their degree of cooperation and compliance with the gossiping process, are also incorporated. From the exact analysis, several important performance metrics and design parameters are analytically determined. Based on the proposed metrics and parameters, the performance of the gossip-based dissemination or search schemes, as well as the impact of the design parameters, are evaluated.

2007

Abstract During the past 30 years of the Internet revolution, the Internet has become a major force of change with an enormous effect on civilization. Consequently, computer networks have evolved into more complex system and become virtually ubiquitous. This in turn, has given raise to a growing demand for scalable and reliable computer system architectures.

Discrete Applied Mathematics, 1994

network has a piece of information (gossip) which should be made known to all other nodes. Gossiping is done by sending letters. In a unit of time each node can either send one letter to a neighbor or receive one such letter, containing one gossip currently known to the sender. Letters reach their destinations with constant probability 0 < q < 1, independently of one another. For a large class of networks, including rings, grids, hypercubes and complete graphs, we construct gossip schemes working in linear time and successfully performing gossiping with probability converging to 1, as the number of nodes grows.

Cluster Computing, 1999

 Three protocols for gossip-based failure detection services in large-scale heterogeneous clusters are analyzed and compared. The basic gossip protocol provides a means by which failures can be detected in large distributed systems in an asynchronous manner without the limits associated with reliable multicasting for group communications. The hierarchical protocol leverages the underlying network topology to achieve faster failure detection. In addition to studying the effectiveness and efficiency of these two agreement protocols, we propose a third protocol that extends the hierarchical approach by piggybacking gossip information on application-generated messages. The protocols are simulated and evaluated with a fault-injection model for scalable distributed systems comprised of clusters of workstations connected by high-performance networks, such as the CPlant machine at Sandia National Laboratories. The model supports permanent and transient node and link failures, with rates specified at simulation time, for processors functioning in a fail-silent fashion. Through high-fidelity, CAD-based modeling and simulation, we demonstrate the strengths and weaknesses of each approach in terms of agreement time, number of gossips, and overall scalability.

IEEE GLOBECOM 2008 - 2008 IEEE Global Telecommunications Conference, 2008

This paper presents GConf, a peer-to-peer Gossip-based delay sensitive N-toN information dissemination protocol, intended for applications such as real-time multiparty conferencing. Through 3-way gossip-based exchanges with randomly selected peers, information frames can be spread throughout the whole community within a delay of 1.5 round-trip-times. The non-delivery probability can be improved exponentially as a function of the peer fanout. Performance evaluations based on a mathematical model and simulations are presented.

Theoretical Computer Science, 1998

This paper considers problems of fault{tolerant information di usion in a network with cost function. We show that the problem of determining the minimumcost necessary to perform fault{ tolerant gossiping among a given set of participants is NP-hard and give approximate (with respect to the cost) fault-tolerant gossiping algorithms. We also analyze the communication time and communication complexity of fault-tolerant gossiping algorithms. Finally, we give an optimal cost fault tolerant broadcasting algorithm and apply our results to the atomic commitment problem.

2007

Gossip is a well-known technique for distributed computing in an arbitrarily connected network of nodes. The gossip algorithm, which is very simple to implement, takes into account strong limitations in computational, communication and energy resources that usually characterize nodes in sensor networks. In gossip, the computational burden is distributed among the nodes, and computation and communication are managed in a very quick and efficient way: in essence, each node acquires its own measure and, starting from it, exchanges information with its neighbors, according with a connection probability distribution. In this paper, we study the performance of gossip algorithms, aiming to test the agreement between analytical results on the averaging time and the actual convergence time for specific scenarios, estimated through numerical simulations. Furthermore, we apply an optimization technique, recently appeared in the literature, that theoretically allow to accelerate convergence. Numerical simulations permit to assess the effects of optimization in real cases, thus evaluating the actual improvement in performance it achieves.