Efficient epidemic multicast in heterogeneous networks

The scalability and resilience of epidemic multicast, also called probabilistic or gossip-based multicast, rests on its symmetry: Each participant node contributes the same share of bandwidth thus spreading the load and allowing for redundancy. On the other hand, the symmetry of gossiping means that it does not avoid nodes or links with less capacity. Unfortunately, one cannot naively avoid such symmetry without also endangering scalability and resilience. In this paper we point out how to break out of this dilemma, by lazily deferring message transmission according to a configurable policy. An experimental proof-of-concept illustrates the approach.