GO: Platform support for gossip applications

Gossip-based protocols are increasingly popular in large-scale distributed applications that disseminate updates to replicated or cached content. GO (gossip objects) is a pernode gossip platform that we developed in support of this class of protocols. In addition to making it easy to develop new gossip protocols and applications, GO allows nodes to join multiple gossip groups without losing the appealing fixed bandwidth guarantee of gossip protocols, and the platform optimizes rumor delivery latency in a principled manner. Our heuristic is based on the observations that multiple rumors can often be squeezed into a single IP packet, and that indirect routing of rumors can speed up delivery. We formalize these observations and develop a theoretical analysis of this heuristic. We have also implemented GO, and study the effectiveness of the heuristic by comparing it to the more standard random dissemination gossip strategy via simulation. We also evaluate GO on a trace from a popular distributed application.