Handling dynamics in gossip-based aggregation schemes

A problem in large and dynamic networks consists in making available at each node global information about the state of the network. Gossip-based aggregation schemes are a simple yet effective mechanism to solve the problem. However, they have to cope with the dynamics either of the network and the values being aggregated and thus have to integrate specific solutions to deal with them. The contribution of this paper is to analyze and compare three different solutions to handle network and values dynamics in gossip-based aggregation schemes: (i) an epoch-based approach based on periodic restarts, (ii) an optimized epoch-based approach based on concurrent aggregation threads and (iii) an original approach based on values evaporation that does not require periodic restarts. Experimental results show that our proposal is effective and often more accurate than epoch-based techniques.