Gossip-Based Networking for Internet-Scale Distributed Systems

Abstract

Abstract. In the era of Internet-scale applications, an increasing number of services are distributed over pools of thousands to millions of networked computers. Along with the obvious advantages in performance and capacity, such a massive scale comes also with challenges. Continuous changes in the system become the norm rather than the exception, either because of inevitable hardware failures or merely due to standard maintenance and upgrading procedures. Rather than trying to impose rigid control on the massive pools of resources, we should equip Internet-scale applications with enough flexibility to work around inevitable faults. In that front, gossiping protocols have emerged as a promising component due to their highly desirable properties: self-healing, self-organizing, symmetric, immensely scalable, and simple. Through visiting a representative set of fundamental gossiping protocols, this paper provides insight on the principles that govern their behavior. By focusing on the rationale and incentives behind gossiping protocols, we introduce the reader to the alternative way of managing massive scale systems through gossiping, and we intrigue her or his interest to delve deeper into the subject by providing an extensive list of pointers.

Increasing the veracity of event detection on social media networks through user trust modeling

“…Gossip protocols are often employed in such situations, ranging from straightforward uniform techniques [37] to more sophisticated stratification of gossip targets and probabilities [38], [39]. By building on top of these or other types of scalable communication mechanisms, reputation-based trust can be used to protect key assets, including cyberphysical critical infrastructure protection systems [40]. This same genre of technique can also be applied to the types of social media networks discussed in this article.…”

Reinventing Mobile Community Computing and Communication

“…Moreover, many users may share enough resources to compute very complex queries which are currently out of their individual scope. Recent research has demonstrated the effectiveness of epidemic protocols in a variety of settings [24], [25], [26]. These include not only traditional peer-to-peer applications such as data dissemination or overlay maintenance, but also user-oriented tasks such as identifying communities with similar interests, or recommendation systems.…”

DATAFLASKS: Epidemic Store for Massive Scale Systems

“…In particular, we designed DATAFLASKS based on a stack of gossip or epidemic protocols which are known for their scalability and resilience under highly dynamic environments. They have been successfully used to build several webscale systems and applications [9] like overlay construction and maintenance [10], [11], consensus [12], data aggregation [13], distributed slicing [14]- [17] and live video streaming [18]. One key characteristic of these protocols is that they rely solely on partial data about the system.…”