Lightweight gossip-based distribution estimation

Monitoring the global state of an overlay network is vital for the self-management of peer-to-peer (P2P) systems. Gossip-based algorithms are a well-known technique that can provide nodes locally with aggregated knowledge about the state of the overlay network. In this paper, we present a gossip-based protocol to estimate the global distribution of attribute values stored across a set of nodes in the system. Our algorithm estimates the distribution both efficiently and accurately. The key contribution of our algorithm is that it has substantially lower overhead than existing distribution estimation algorithms. We evaluated our system in simulation, and compared it against the state-of-the-art solutions. The results show similar accuracy to its counterparts, but with a communication overhead of an order of magnitude lower than them. © 2013 IEEE.