Updates in highly unreliable, replicated peer-to-peer systems

This paper studies the problem of updates in decentralised and self-organising P2P systems in which peers have low online probabilities and only local knowledge. The update strategy we propose for this environment is based on a hybrid push/pull rumor spreading algorithm and provides a fully decentralised, efficient and robust communication scheme which offers probabilistic guarantees rather than ensuring strict consistency. We describe a generic analytical model to investigate the utility of our hybrid update propagation scheme from the perspective of communication overhead.