How Efficient Can Gossip Be? (On the Cost of Resilient Information Exchange)

Gossip protocols, also known as epidemic dissemination schemes, are becoming increasingly popular in distributed systems. Yet, it has remained a partially open question to determine how robust such protocols can be. We consider a natural extension of the random phone-call model by Karp et al. [21], in which we analyze two different notions of robustness: the ability to tolerate adaptive failures, and the ability to tolerate oblivious failures. For adaptive failures, we present a new gossip protocol, TrickleGossip, which achieves near-optimal O(n log3 n) message complexity; to the best of our knowledge, this is the first epidemic-style protocol that can tolerate adaptive failures. We also show a direct relation between resilience and message complexity, demonstrating that gossip protocols which tolerate a large number of adaptive failures need to use a super-linear number of messages with high probability. For oblivious failures, we present a new gossip protocol, CoordinatedGossip, that...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2010
• Where: ICALP
• Authors: Dan Alistarh, Seth Gilbert, Rachid Guerraoui, Morteza Zadimoghaddam
• Keywords: Adaptive Failures, Gossip Protocol, ICALP 2010, Message Complexity, Programming Languages