Unlike the Telephone network or the Internet, many of the next generation networks are not engineered for the purpose of providing efficient communication between various networked entities. Examples abound: sensor networks, peer-to-peer networks, mobile networks of vehicles and social networks. Indeed, these emerging networks do require algorithms for communication, computation, or merely spre...

In addition to the popular structured peer-to-peer (P2P) overlays [2], a class of P2P protocols rely purely on gossip-based communication in an unstructured communication topology [6]. Examples of problems that can be solved through these protocols include membership management, information dissemination (as in lpbcast [5] and newscast [7]), and computation of aggregate functions (such as avera...

Gossip protocols aim at arriving, by means of point-to-point or group communications, at a situation in which all the agents know each other’s secrets. We consider distributed gossip protocols which are expressed by means of epistemic logic. We provide an operational semantics of such protocols and set up an appropriate framework to argue about their correctness. Then we analyze specific protoc...

The dominant eigenvector of matrices defined by weighted links in overlay networks plays an important role in many peer-to-peer applications. Examples include trust management, importance ranking to support search, and virtual coordinate systems to facilitate managing network proximity. Robust and efficient asynchronous distributed algorithms are known only for the case when the dominant eigenv...

The present study examined two fundamental social behaviours, social curiosity and gossip, and their interrelations in an English (n = 218) and a German sample (n = 152). Analyses showed that both samples believed that they are less gossipy but more curious than their peers. Multidimensional SEM of self and trait conceptions indicated that social curiosity and gossip are related constructs but ...

Distributed averaging is a relevant problem in several application areas, such as decentralized computation, sensor networks, clock synchronization and coordinated control of mobile autonomous agents. Gossip randomized consensus algorithms provide a particular simple and efficient solution of such a problem. These algorithms however need bidirectional communication among agents and this can be ...

The present online-questionnaire study examined two fundamental social behaviors, social curiosity and gossip, and their interrelations in an English (n = 218) and a German sample (n = 152). Analyses showed that both samples believed that they are less gossipy but more curious than their peers. Multidimensional SEM of self and trait conceptions indicated that social curiosity and gossip are rel...

Gossip plays a very significant role in human society. Information spreads throughout the human grapevine at an amazing speed, often reaching almost everyone in a community, without any central coordinator. Moreover, rumor tends to be extremely stubborn: once spread, it is nearly impossible to erase it. In many distributed computer systems—most notably in cloud computing and peer-to-peer comput...