Peer-to-Peer Membership Management for Gossip-Based Protocols

Gossip-based protocols for group communication have attractive scalability and reliability properties. The probabilistic gossip schemes studied so far typically assume that each group member has full knowledge of the global membership and chooses gossip targets uniformly at random. The requirement of global knowledge impairs their applicability to very large-scale groups. In this paper, we present SCAMP (Scalable Membership protocol), a novel peer-to-peer membership protocol which operates in a fully decentralised manner and provides each member with a partial view of the group membership. Our protocol is self-organizing in the sense that the size of partial views naturally converges to the value required to support a gossip algorithm reliably. This value is a function of the group size but is achieved without any node knowing the group size. We propose additional mechanisms to achieve balanced view sizes even with highly unbalanced subscription patterns. A.J. Ganesh , A.-M. Kermarrec and L. Massoulié are with Microsoft Research, 7JJ Thomson Avenue, Cambridge CB3 0 FB, UK. E-mail: