EPH: An Efficient and Robust Group Membership Topology for Distributed Systems

Group membership protocols in distributed systems enable entities in a group to be aware of all other entities in the group. This information is essential for the system to perform as a cohesive unit collaborating to achieve a common objective. In dynamic environments where devices join and leave the group frequently and failures occur, maintaining consistent group membership information efficiently is a non-trivial problem. We evaluate different logical topologies used to represent distributed systems and propose a group membership topology, extended polygonal hubs (EPH) which provides, 1) faster view convergence times and 2) better robustness characteristics compared to traditional hierarchical trees.