IRWIN AND JOAN JACOBS CENTER FOR COMMUNICATION AND INFORMATION TECHNOLOGIES Correctness of Gossip-Based Membership under Message Loss

Due to their simplicity and effectiveness, gossip-based membership protocols have become the method of choice for maintaining partial membership in large P2P systems. A variety of gossip-based membership protocols were proposed. Some were shown to be effective empirically, lacking analytic understanding of their properties. Others were analyzed under simplifying assumptions, such as lossless and delay-less network. It is not clear whether the analysis results hold in dynamic networks where both nodes and network links can fail. In this paper we try to bridge this gap. We first enumerate the desirable properties of a gossip-based membership protocol, such as view uniformity, independence, and load balance. We then propose a simple Send & Forget protocol, and show that even in the presence of message loss, it achieves the desirable properties.