On the effects of partial membership knowledge on reliability of gossip-based multicast

Gossip-based multicast schemes have attracted increasing interest, because they are easy to deploy and resilient to failures. However, traditional gossip-based protocols rely on each process having knowledge of the global membership, thus limiting their scalability. To overcome this problem several protocols have been developed that can operate with processes having only a partial view of the global membership. We discuss the effects of partial views on the reliability of gossip-based multicast protocols. Specifically, we identify three desirable properties for views and show constructions of views satisfying these properties. Numerical results obtained show that reliability can be considerably affected by views adopted, especially in the presence of faulty processes.