Towards implementing group membership in dynamic networks : a performance evaluation study

Support for dynamic groups is an integral part of the U.S. Department of Defense's vision of Network-Centric Operations. Group membership (GM) serves as the foundation of many group-oriented systems; its fundamental role in applications such as reliable group multicast, group key management, data replication, and distributed collaboration, makes optimization of its efficiency important. The impact of GM's performance is amplified in dynamic, failure-prone environments with intermittent connectivity and limited bandwidth, such as those that host military on the move operations. A recent theoretical result has proposed a novel GM algorithm, called Sigma, which solves the Group Membership problem within a single round of message exchange. In contrast, all other GM algorithms require more rounds in the worst case. Sigma's breakthrough design both makes and handles tradeoffs between fast agreement and possible transient disagreement, raising the question: how efficiently and accurately does Sigma perform in practice? We answer this question by implementing and studying Sigma in simulation, as well as two leading GM algorithms - Moshe and Ensemble - in a comparative performance analysis. Among the variants of Sigma that we study is Leader-Based Sigma, which we design as a more scalable alternative.

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2005

Author dc:creator

• Yuditskaya, Sophia

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Roger Khazan and Clifford Weinstein.

• Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

Statement dc:rights

• M.I.T. theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/33374

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/33374