NEEM: network-friendly epidemic multicast

Abstract

Epidemic, or probabilistic, multicast protocols have emerged as a viable mechanism to circumvent the scalability problems of reliable multicast protocols. However, most existing epidemic approaches use connectionless transport protocols to exchange messages and rely on the intrinsic robustness of the epidemic dissemination to mask network omissions. Unfortunately, such an approach is not networkfriendly, since the epidemic protocol makes no effort to reduce the load imposed on the network when the system is congested.In this paper, we propose a novel epidemic protocol whose main characteristic is to be network-friendly. This property is achieved by relying on connection-oriented transport connections, such as TCP/IP, to support the communication among peers. Since during congestion messages accumulate in the border of the network, the protocol uses an innovative buffer management scheme, that combines different selection techniques to discard messages upon overflow. This technique improves the quality of the information delivered to the application during periods of network congestion. The protocol has been implemented and the benefits of the approach are illustrated using a combination of experimental and simulation results.

Epidemic Broadcast Trees

“…Naturally, these strategies can be combined in different hybrid approaches. Protocols that combine push and pull approaches have been described in [1,19]. A protocol that combines eager push and lazy push is described in [3].…”

CLON: Overlay Networks and Gossip Protocols for Cloud Environments

“…the decision of when and how to send the message payload to the neighbors may follow several approaches [13], which we describe next. The most common gossiping strategy is eager push, in which peers relay a message as soon as received to a number of targets for a given number of rounds, and is used by several well known protocols [7,12,18]. The major drawback of this strategy is the amount of bandwidth required, as multiple message copies are received by nodes.…”

An adaptive algorithm for efficient message diffusion in unreliable environments

“…Many works have investigated this problem from a probabilistic perspective (e.g., [2,4,9,10,11,12]). Probabilistic algorithms scale much better than deterministic ones and achieve high reliability.…”