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Meeting the deadline: on the complexity of fault-tolerant continuous gossip

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Abstract

In this paper we introduce the problem of Continuous Gossip in which rumors are continually and dynamically injected throughout the network. Each rumor has a deadline, and the goal of a continuous gossip protocol is to ensure good “Quality of Delivery,” i.e., to deliver every rumor to every process before the deadline expires. Thus, a trivial solution to the problem of Continuous Gossip is simply for every process to broadcast every rumor as soon as it is injected. Unfortunately, this solution has high per-round message complexity. Complicating matters, we focus our attention on a highly dynamic network in which processes may continually crash and recover. In order to achieve good per-round message complexity in a dynamic network, processes need to continually form and re-form coalitions that cooperate to spread their rumors throughout the network. The key challenge for a Continuous Gossip protocol is the ongoing adaptation to the ever-changing set of active rumors and non-crashed process. In this work we show how to address this challenge; we develop randomized and deterministic protocols for Continuous Gossip and prove lower bounds on the per-round message-complexity, indicating that our protocols are close to optimal.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science, University of Cyprus, 1048, Nicosia, Cyprus

    Chryssis Georgiou

  2. Department of Computer Science, National University of Singapore, Singapore, 119077, Singapore

    Seth Gilbert

  3. Department of Computer Science, University of Liverpool, Liverpool, L69 3BX, UK

    Dariusz R. Kowalski

Authors
  1. Chryssis Georgiou
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  2. Seth Gilbert
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  3. Dariusz R. Kowalski
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Chryssis Georgiou.

Additional information

This work is supported by UCY (RA) CS-CG2011, NUS (FRC) R-252-000-443-133, and the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council [grant numbers EP/G023018/1, EP/H018816/1].

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Georgiou, C., Gilbert, S. & Kowalski, D.R. Meeting the deadline: on the complexity of fault-tolerant continuous gossip. Distrib. Comput. 24, 223–244 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00446-011-0144-6

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00446-011-0144-6

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