Equational Reasonings in Wireless Network Gossip Protocols

TL;DR

This paper introduces a compositional analysis technique using a probabilistic process calculus and simulation theory to evaluate and compare gossip protocols in wireless sensor networks, accounting for collisions and randomness.

Contribution

It presents a novel simulation-based algebraic framework tailored for probabilistic wireless gossip protocols, enabling performance estimation and protocol comparison.

Findings

Effective algebraic laws for gossip network performance estimation

Simulation theory suitable for protocols with non-equivalent behaviors

Framework accommodates communication collisions and randomness

Abstract

Gossip protocols have been proposed as a robust and efficient method for disseminating information throughout large-scale networks. In this paper, we propose a compositional analysis technique to study formal probabilistic models of gossip protocols expressed in a simple probabilistic timed process calculus for wireless sensor networks. We equip the calculus with a simulation theory to compare probabilistic protocols that have similar behaviour up to a certain tolerance. The theory is used to prove a number of algebraic laws which revealed to be very effective to estimate the performances of gossip networks, with and without communication collisions, and randomised gossip networks. Our simulation theory is an asymmetric variant of the weak bisimulation metric that maintains most of the properties of the original definition. However, our asymmetric version is particularly suitable to reason on protocols in which the systems under consideration are not approximately equivalent, as in the case of gossip protocols.