GosSkip, an Efficient, Fault-Tolerant and Self Organizing Overlay Using Gossip-based Construction and Skip-Lists principles

This paper presents GosSkip, a self organizing and fully distributed overlay that provides a scalable support to data storage and retrieval in dynamic environments. The structure of GosSkip, while initially possibly chaotic, eventually matches a perfect set of Skip-list-like structures, where no hash is used on data attributes, thus preserving semantic locality and permitting range queries. The use of epidemic-based protocols is the key to scalability, fairness and good behavior of the protocol under churn, while preserving the simplicity of the approach and maintaining O(log(N)) state per peer and O(log(N)) routing costs. In addition, we propose a simple and efficient mechanism to exploit the presence of multiple data items on a single physical node. GosSkip’s behavior in both a static and a dynamic scenario is further conveyed by experiments with an actual implementation and real traces of a peer to peer workload.