Gossip and Epidemic Protocols

Abstract Agossip protocolis a distributed communication paradigm inspired by the gossip phenomenon that can be observed in social networks. Initially born to efficiently disseminate information, as its human counterpart, it has been later used to solve several other problems, such as failure detection, data aggregation, distributed topology construction, and resource allocation –to name just a few. Gossip protocols tend to be used in contexts where both the scale and the dynamism of the underlying communication network make the adoption of traditional communication protocols highly unpractical. In this article, we first introduce a collection of gossip protocols for information diffusion, and we provide an analytical model to study their performance with respect to speed and quality of the diffusion. We then introduce three representative examples of gossip‐based protocols that solve the most diverse problems, namely, membership management, aggregation, and overlay topology construction.