Gossiping Capabilities

Gossip-based protocols are now acknowledged as a sound basis to implement collaborative high-bandwidth content dissemination: content location is disseminated through gossip, the actual contents being subsequently pulled. In this paper, we present HEAP, HEterogeneity Aware gossip Protocol, where nodes dynamically adjust their contribution to gossip dissemination according to their capabilities. Using a continuous, itself gossip-based, approximation of relative capabilities, HEAP dynamically leverages the most capable nodes by (a) increasing their fanouts (while decreasing by the same proportion those of less capable nodes) and (b) employing them early in the dissemination chain. These, on the other hand, have an incentive to take on additional load as being first in the chain improves their perceived quality. A lightweight accountability mechanism is used to track selfish nodes that might declare a high capability in order to augment their perceived quality without contributing accordingly. We evaluate HEAP in the context of a video streaming application on a 236 PlanetLab nodes testbed. Our results shows that HEAP improves the quality of the streaming by 25% over a standard gossip protocol without impacting the average load or availability of the system