Gossip Protocol
Gossip protocol is a communication
protocol that allows state sharing in distributed systems. Most modern systems
use this peer-to-peer protocol to disseminate information to all the members in
a network or cluster.
Its also a technique used for detecting the failure of
a server in a distributed system.
• Each node maintains a node membership list, which
contains member IDs and heartbeat counters.
• Each node periodically increments its heartbeat
counter.
• Each node
periodically sends heartbeats to a set of random nodes, which in turn propagate
to another set of nodes.
• Once nodes
receive heartbeats, membership list is updated to the latest info.
• If the
heartbeat has not increased for more than predefined periods, the member is
considered as offline.
