A Stochastic Characterization of a Fault-Tolerant Gossip Algorithm

Gossiping is a popular technique for probabilistic reliable multicast (or broadcast), whose service is often needed in reliable distributed computing and systems. However, existing analytic studies of gossip schemes are often based on ideas borrowed from epidemic models, and thus inherit some features that may not be appropriate for the setting of gossiping. Specifically, in epidemic spreading, an infected node typically intends to spread the infection an unbounded number of times (or rounds); whereas in gossiping, an infected node (i.e., a node having received the message in question) may prefer to gossip the message a bounded number of times. Motivated by this, we intend to understand the behavior of a simple abstraction and algorithm for a popular class of fault-tolerant gossip schemes.