Connectivity recovery in epidemic membership protocols

Epidemic protocols are a bio-inspired communication and computation paradigm for extreme-scale network system based on randomized communication. The protocols rely on a membership service to build decentralized and random overlay topologies. In a weakly connected overlay topology, a naive mechanism of membership protocols can break the connectivity, thus impairing the accuracy of the application. This work investigates the factors in membership protocols that cause the loss of global connectivity and introduces the first topology connectivity recovery mechanism. The mechanism is integrated into the Expander Membership Protocol, which is then evaluated against other membership protocols. The analysis shows that the proposed connectivity recovery mechanism is effective in preserving topology connectivity and also helps to improve the application performance in terms of convergence speed.