Epidemic Information Dissemination in Distributed Systems

T he peer-to-peer (P2P) computing modeloffers a radically different and appealingalternative to the traditional client-servermodel for many large-scale applications indistributed settings. In this model, end-user processes share resources in a peer style, poten-tially acting as both client and server. The P2P approach removes central points of failure and associated performance bottlenecks; it also bal-ances the load—such as forwarding messages or storing data—among all system processes, each of which requires only local knowledge of the system state. However, designing scalable P2P application-level protocols is not straightforward and remains an active area of research. Epidemic algorithms have recently gained popu-larity as a potentially effective solution for dissem-inating information in large-scale systems,1 particularly P2P systems deployed on Internet or a