Gossip-based aggregation in large dynamic networks

作者：Márk Jelasity, Alberto Montresor, Özalp Babaoğlu · 发表于：ACM Transactions on Computer Systems · 年份：2005 · DOI：10.1145/1082469.1082470 · 被引用次数：725 · 研究领域：Peer-to-Peer Network Technologies、Distributed systems and fault tolerance、Distributed and Parallel Computing Systems

As computer networks increase in size, become more heterogeneous and span greater geographic distances, applications must be designed to cope with the very large scale, poor reliability, and often, with the extreme dynamism of the underlying network. Aggregation is a key functional building block for such applications: it refers to a set of functions that provide components of a distributed system access to global information including network size, average load, average uptime, location and description of hotspots, and so on. Local access to global information is often very useful, if not indispensable for building applications that are robust and adaptive. For example, in an industrial control application, some aggregate value reaching a threshold may trigger the execution of certain actions; a distributed storage system will want to know the total available free space; load-balancing protocols may benefit from knowing the target average load so as to minimize the load they transfer. We propose a gossip-based protocol for computing aggregate values over network components in a fully decentralized fashion. The class of aggregate functions we can compute is very broad and includes many useful special cases such as counting, averages, sums, products, and extremal values. The protocol is suitable for extremely large and highly dynamic systems due to its proactive structure---all nodes receive the aggregate value continuously, thus being able to track any changes in the system. ...