Network-Friendly Gossiping

The emergence of large-scale distributed applications based on many-to-many communication models, e.g., broadcast and decentralized group communication, has an important impact on the underlying layers, notably the Internet routing infrastructure. To make an e ective use of network resources, protocols should both limit the stress (amount of messages) on each infrastructure entity (routers, links), and balance as much as possible the load in the network. Most protocols use application-level metrics such as delays to improve e ciency of content dissemination or routing, but the extend to which such application-centric optimizations help reduce and balance the load imposed to the infrastructure is unclear. In this paper, we elaborate on the design of such network-friendly protocols and associated metrics. More speci cally, we investigate randomness-based gossip dissemination. We propose and evaluate di erent ways of making this representative protocol network-friendly, while keeping its desirable properties (robustness and low delays). Simulations of the proposed methods using synthetic and real network topologies convey and compare their abilities to reduce and balance the load while keeping good performance.