Gossip based protocols are widely used in distributed systems for robust dissemination of information. The problem: spreading a message among a set of processes. For example, in the Bitcoin P2P network, whenever a new transaction happens, it needs to be broadcast to all peers in order for it to end up on the blockchain. Typically, such information originates at one of the nodes in the network, and needs to be communicated to the rest of the peers.

One elegant solution to this problem mimics how rumours spread in the society by word of mouth, namely “gossip” based protocols. The gossip component of every non-faulty process in the network maintains two main pieces of state: a list of other known live peers, and a buffer of recent messages. Then every T seconds, (called the gossip period), every node executes the following:

1. Pick f peers from the membership list at random. Here, f is called the gossip fanout.
2. Send recent messages from our messages buffer to each of these peers.

Of course, in parallel, each node must listen for messages and update its message buffer.

The details like the value of the gossip fanout, and what exact messages to relay, and for how many rounds, etc. are what make different gossip protocols different, but we aren’t going to talk much about it here.

Analysis

The analysis focuses on finding upper bounds for:

• The number of rounds needed to get an update to all participants.
• The load on each participating peer.

To begin with, we note that the inherent random nature of the algorithm means that we can only comment about the expected behaviour of the protocol — i.e., we are after the number of rounds that a cluster of N nodes needs to have a message disseminated across the cluster with high probability.

Dissemination time

This refers to the number of gossip rounds before we can be reasonably sure about a message having been disseminated across the cluster.

This analysis is borrowed (indirectly) from work on epidemiology — our problem is not so different from a situation where an infected organism comes in contact with random uninfected individuals, thereby infecting them. These individuals in turn go on to infect others and so on.

For our purpose, we shall say that a node in possession of a particular message M is “infected”, while nodes which don’t know about M yet are uninfected. Let’s further suppose that after round T, x nodes are still uninfected, and y nodes are infected. Of course, at T=0, x=N-1, and y=1 (i.e., we have one “infected” node that knows of the message M and is now out to infect others with this knowledge). Now because each node picks f others at random to gossip with, and because the proportion of uninfected nodes in the cluster is $\frac{x}{N}$, on average any given infected node will pick $\frac{x}{N}f$ uninfected nodes. Since there are $y$ such infected nodes, on average, we’ll see $\frac{f}{N}xy$ infected-uninfected interactions in a round. Since an uninfected node turns into an infected node after receiving the message M, on average, each round results in a decrease in the number of uninfected nodes ($x$) by this quantity $\frac{f}{N}xy$. Therefore,

Let $\beta = \frac{f}{N}$

Then,

Let $\frac{1}{x\left(N-x\right)} = \frac{A}{x} + \frac{B}{N-x} \implies A\left(N-x\right) + Bx = 1$.

Now setting $x=0 \implies A = \frac{1}{N}$, and setting $x=N \implies B = \frac{1}{N}$. Using this in $\eqref{eqn}$, we have

Where $C$ is the constant of integration. To find it, we note that at $T=0, x=N-1$. Using this in \eqref{eqn2}, we find that $C=-\frac{ln\left(N-1\right)}{N}$. Substituting this value for $C$ in \eqref{eqn2} then yields:

So, as $T$ (number of gossip rounds) grows, the expected value of the fraction $x\over N$ of uninfected nodes rapidly approaches zero. Since the number of infected nodes $y=N-x$, we have the proportion of uninfected nodes

As we grow $T\to\infty$,

Hence the expected proportion of infected nodes reaches 100% as the protocol keeps running. But this begs the question, how long in practice do we have to wait before the whole cluster gets the new message with high probability? Let’s call $T_{1\over2}$ the number of rounds when half of the cluster gets the update, i.e., at $T=T_{h}$, $\frac{x}{N}=\frac{y}{N}=\frac{1}{2}$. Therefore, from the expression for $\frac{x}{N}$ above,

Now using $\beta = {f\over N}$, we get $T_h = \frac{1}{f}\ln{\left(N-1\right)} = O\left(\ln{N}\right)$. Hence, the half life of the process is logarithmic in the number of participants $N$. Now, to find the number of rounds it takes for $99\%$ of the uninfected nodes to befome infected can be computed as:

So we see that within a logarithmic number of rounds, a most of the nodes get infected with high probability.

A dissemination mechanism is no good if it puts unreasonable load on member nodes, and/or fails to spread out the load evenly across the cluster. In gossip based dissemination, each node sends out $f$ messages, and receives on expectation $f\over N$ messages per round. Since $\Theta\left(\ln{N}\right)$ rounds are needed for a message to get to the whole cluster, the load on each node is also logarithmic in $N$, and every node has similar load. This is quite nice, since one can grow the cluster to very huge sizes, and even then the load on each node remains reasonably low.