What is Gossip Protocol

A gossip protocol is a style of computer-to-computer communication protocol inspired by the form of gossip seen in social networks. Modern distributed systems often use gossip protocols to solve problems that might be difficult to solve in other ways, either because the underlying network has an inconvenient structure, is extremely large, or because gossip solutions are the most efficient ones available. Gossip protocols are probabilistic in nature: a node chooses its partner node with which to communicate randomly. They are scalable because each node sends only a fixed number of messages, independent of the number of nodes in the network. In addition, a node does not wait for acknowledgments nor does it take some recovery action should an acknowledgment not arrive. They achieve fault-tolerance because a node receives copies of a message from different nodes. No node has a specific role to play, and so a failed node will not prevent other nodes from continuing sending messages. Hence, there is no need for failure detection or specific recovery actions.

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Ganesh Chandra Deka (Ministry of Labour and Employment, India)