Section: Scientific Foundations

Epidemic protocols

Epidemic algorithms, also called gossip-based algorithms [98] , [97] , are consistently used in our research. In the context of distributed systems, epidemic protocols are mainly used to create overlay networks and to ensure a reliable information dissemination in a large-scale distributed system. The principle underlying the technique, in analogy with the spread of a rumor among humans via gossiping, is that participating entities continuously exchange information about the system in order to spread it gradually and reliably. Epidemic algorithms have proven efficient to build and maintain large-scale distributed systems in the context of many applications such as broadcasting [97] , monitoring, resource management, search, and more generally in building unstructured peer-to-peer networks.