Impacts of asynchrony on epidemic-style aggregation protocols

Abstract

The large scale and dynamic nature of a distributed system makes it difficult to collect the attributes of the individual nodes in the network. In these systems, often an aggregate (e.g. AVG, COUNT, MIN, MAX, SUM etc) of these attributes is adequate. Epidemic-style protocols are one of the popular approaches to estimate aggregates in such systems. In existing epidemic-style aggregation protocols the accuracy of the estimated aggregate at local nodes heavily depends upon synchronization of aggregation rounds. To enforce synchronization in these protocols, length of aggregation round should be long enough so that all the nodes in the system complete their aggregation information exchange. In t..