The "art" of programming gossip-based systems

Abstract

How does one best go about building actual gossip-based protocols? Trying to answer this question has brought us to address two preliminary questions, namely (1) what the intrinsics of such systems or protocols are, and (2) what kind of applications would in the end be built on top of such protocols. We address the first question by arguing that gossip-based protocols are all built following one and the same pattern, and describing three building blocks which we claim are used to support this recurrent pattern---most notably a source of randomness. We validate these claims by devising simplified versions of well-known protocols, in a layered fashion, on top of a conceptual interface describing these basic services. The second question is addressed by arguing that gossip-based protocols exhibit some probabilistic or imperfect flavor (e.g., probabilistic or partial completion), and by proposing to take such probabilistic behavior into account when devising interfaces for applications building on top of gossip-based protocols. We argue for inherent support for these probabilities in the programming model.