Flat and hierarchical epidemics in P2P systems: Energy cost models and analysis

•Power awareness of flat and hierarchical epidemics in P2P systems is addressed.•We developed energy cost model formulations for flat and hierarchical epidemics.•We proposed a dominating-set based and power-aware hierarchical epidemic approach.•Through large scale simulations on PeerSim, we compared the epidemic approaches.•We analyzed the effect of epidemic protocol parameters on energy consumption.

In large scale distributed systems, epidemic or gossip-based communication mechanisms are preferred for their ease of deployment, simplicity, robustness against failures, load-balancing and limited resource usage. Although they have extensive applicability, there is no prior work on developing energy cost models for epidemic distributed mechanisms. In this study, we address power awareness features of two main groups of epidemics, namely flat and hierarchical. We propose a dominating-set based and power-aware hierarchical epidemic approach that eliminates a significant number of peers from gossiping. To the best of our knowledge, using a dominating set to build a hierarchy for epidemic communication and provide energy efficiency in P2P systems is a novel approach. We develop energy cost model formulations for flat and hierarchical epidemics. In contrast to the prior works, our study is the first one that proposes energy cost models for generic peers using epidemic communication, and examines the effect of protocol parameters to characterize energy consumption. As a case study protocol, we use our epidemic protocol ProFID for frequent items discovery in P2P systems. By means of extensive large scale simulations on PeerSim, we analyze the effect of protocol parameters on energy consumption, compare flat and hierarchical epidemic approaches for efficiency, scalability, and applicability as well as investigate their resilience under realistic churn.