Epidemic protocols are a bio-inspired communication and computation paradigm for large-scale network system based on randomised communication. These protocols rely on a membership service to build decentralised and random overlay topologies. In large-scale, dynamic network environments, node churn and failures may have a detrimental effect on the structure of the overlay topologies with negative impact on the efficiency and the accuracy of applications. Most importantly, there exists the risk of a permanent loss of global connectivity that would prevent the correct convergence of applications. This work investigates to what extent a dynamic network environment may negatively affect the performance of Epidemic membership protocols. A novel Enhanced Expander Membership Protocol (EMP+) based on the expansion properties of graphs is presented. The proposed protocol is evaluated against other membership protocols and the comparative analysis shows that EMP+ can support faster application convergence and is the first membership protocol to provide robustness against global network connectivity problems.
Epidemic protocols are a bio-inspired communication and computation paradigm for extreme-scale network system based on randomized communication. The protocols rely on a membership service to build decentralized and random overlay topologies. In a weakly connected overlay topology, a naive mechanism of membership protocols can break the connectivity, thus impairing the accuracy of the application. This work investigates the factors in membership protocols that cause the loss of global connectivity and introduces the first topology connectivity recovery mechanism. The mechanism is integrated into the Expander Membership Protocol, which is then evaluated against other membership protocols. The analysis shows that the proposed connectivity recovery mechanism is effective in preserving topology connectivity and also helps to improve the application performance in terms of convergence speed.
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