As computer networks increase in size, become more heterogeneous and span greater geographic distances, applications must be designed to cope with the very large scale, poor reliability, and often, with the extreme dynamism of the underlying network. Aggregation is a key functional building block for such applications: it refers to a set of functions that provide components of a distributed system access to global information including network size, average load, average uptime, location and description of hotspots, and so on. Local access to global information is often very useful, if not indispensable for building applications that are robust and adaptive. For example, in an industrial control application, some aggregate value reaching a threshold may trigger the execution of certain actions; a distributed storage system will want to know the total available free space; load-balancing protocols may benefit from knowing the target average load so as to minimize the load they transfer. We propose a gossip-based protocol for computing aggregate values over network components in a fully decentralized fashion. The class of aggregate functions we can compute is very broad and includes many useful special cases such as counting, averages, sums, products, and extremal values. The protocol is suitable for extremely large and highly dynamic systems due to its proactive structure—all nodes receive the aggregate value continuously, thus being able to track

Unstructured overlays form an important class of peer-to-peer networks, notably when content-based searching is at stake. The construction of these overlays, which is essentially a membership management issue, is crucial. Ideally, the resulting overlays should have low diameter and be resilient to massive node failures, which are both characteristic properties of random graphs. In addition, they should be able to deal with a high node churn (i.e., expect high-frequency membership changes). Inexpensive membership management while retaining random-graph properties is therefore important. In this paper, we describe a novel gossip-based membership management protocol that meets these requirements. Our protocol is shown to construct graphs that have low diameter, low clustering, highly symmetric node degrees, and that are highly resilient to massive node failures. Moreover, we show that the protocol is highly reactive to restoring randomness when a large number of nodes fail. KEY WORDS: Membership management; peer-to-peer; epidemic/gossiping protocols; unstructured overlays; random graphs.

Recent developments in information technology have brought about important changes in distributed computing. New environments have emerged such as massively large-scale wide area computer networks and mobile ad hoc networks. These new environments are extremely dynamic, unreliable and often large-scale. Traditional approaches to designing distributed applications based on central control, small scale or strict reliability assumptions are not suitable for exploiting the enormous potential of these environments. Based on the observation that living organisms efficiently organize a large number of unreliable and dynamically changing components (cells, molecules, individuals of a population, etc) it has long been an interesting area of research to try to figure out what are the key ideas that make biological systems work and to apply these ideas in distributed systems engineering. In this paper we propose a conceptual framework that captures a few basic biological processes such as plain diffusion, reaction-diffusion, proliferation, etc. We show through examples how to implement practically relevant functions based on these ideas. Using a common evaluation methodology, we show that these applications have state-of-the-art effectivity and performance while they inherit some nice properties of biological systems, such as adaptivity and robustness to failure.

Abstract. A lot of recent research on content-based P2P searching for filesharing applications has focused on exploiting semantic relations between peers to facilitate searching. To the best of our knowledge, all methods proposed to date suggest reactive ways to seize peers ’ semantic relations. That is, they rely on the usage of the underlying search mechanism, and infer semantic relations based on the queries placed and the corresponding replies received. In this paper we follow a different approach, proposing a proactive method to build a semantic overlay. Our method is based on an epidemic protocol that clusters peers with similar content. It is worth noting that this peer clustering is done in a completely implicit way, that is, without requiring the user to specify his preferences or to characterize the content of files he shares. 1

In this paper, we address the problem of constructing scalable content-based publish/subscribe systems. Publish/subscribe systems are asynchronous event-notification systems in which a published event is forwarded to exactly those nodes that have previously subscribed for that event. Subscriptions can range from a simple specification of merely the type of an event to a specification of the value ranges that an event's attributes can have. Notably the latter poses potential scalability problems.

This paper presents Araneola 1, a scalable reliable application-level multicast system for highly dynamic wide-area environments. Araneola supports multi-point to multi-point reliable communication in a fully distributed manner while incurring constant load (in terms of message and space complexity) on each node. For a tunable parameter k ≥ 3, Araneola constructs and dynamically maintains a basic overlay structure in which each node’s degree is either k or k +1, and roughly 90 % of the nodes have degree k. Empirical evaluation shows that Araneola’s basic overlay achieves three important mathematical properties of k-regular random graphs (i.e., random graphs in which each node has exactly k neighbors) with N nodes: (i) its diameter grows logarithmically with N; (ii) it is generally k-connected; and (iii) it remains highly connected following random removal of linear-size subsets of edges or nodes. The overlay is constructed and maintained at a low cost: each join, leave, or failure is handled locally, and entails the sending of only about 3k messages in total, independent of N. Moreover, this cost decreases as the churn rate increases. The low degree of Araneola’s basic overlay structure allows for allocating plenty of additional bandwidth for specific application needs. In this paper, we give an example for such a need — communicating with nearby nodes; we enhance the basic overlay with additional links chosen according to geographic

Recently there has been an increasing interest to harness the potential of P2P technology to design and build rich environments where services are provided and multiple applications can be supported in a flexible and dynamic manner. In such a context, resource assignment to services and applications is crucial. Current approaches require significant “manual-mode ” operations and/or rely on centralized servers to maintain resource availability. Such approaches are neither scalable nor robust enough. Our contribution towards the solution of this problem is proposing and evaluating a gossip-based protocol to automatically partition the available nodes into “slices”, also taking into account specific attributes of the nodes. These slices can be assigned to run services or applications in a fully selforganizing but controlled manner. The main advantages of the proposed protocol are extreme scalability and robustness. We present approximative theoretical models and extensive empirical analysis of the proposed protocol. 1.

This paper presents RaWMS, a novel lightweight random membership service for ad hoc networks. The service provides each node with a partial uniformly chosen view of network nodes. Such a membership service is useful, e.g., in data dissemination algorithms, lookup and discovery services, peer sampling services, and complete membership construction. The design of RaWMS is based on a novel reverse random walk (RW) sampling technique. The paper includes a formal analysis of both the reverse RW sampling technique and RaWMS and verifies it through a detailed simulation study. In addition, RaWMS is compared both analytically and by simulations with a number of other known methods such as flooding and gossip-based techniques.

Gossip, or epidemic, protocols have emerged as a powerful strategy to implement highly scalable and resilient reliable broadcast primitives. Due to scalability reasons, each participant in a gossip protocol maintains a partial view of the system. The reliability of the gossip protocol depends upon some critical properties of these views, such as degree distribution and clustering coefficient. Several algorithms have been proposed to maintain partial views for gossip protocols. In this paper, we show that under a high number of faults, these algorithms take a long time to restore the desirable view properties. To address this problem, we present HyParView, a new membership protocol to support gossip-based broadcast that ensures high levels of reliability even in the presence of high rates of node failure. The HyParView protocol is based on a novel approach that relies in the use of two distinct partial views, which are maintained with different goals by different strategies. 1

Peer to peer (P2P) systems are moving from application specific architectures to a generic service oriented design philosophy. This raises interesting problems in connection with providing useful P2P middleware services capable of dealing with resource assignment and management in a large-scale, heterogeneous and unreliable environment. The slicing service, has been proposed to allow for an automatic partitioning of P2P networks into groups (slices) that represent a controllable amount of some resource and that are also relatively homogeneous with respect to that resource. In this paper we propose two gossip-based algorithms to solve the distributed slicing problem. The first algorithm speeds up an existing algorithm sorting a set of uniform random numbers. The second algorithm statistically approximates the rank of nodes in the ordering. The scalability, efficiency and resilience to dynamics of both algorithms rely on their gossip-based models. These algorithms are proved viable theoretically and experimentally.