Exploring the interdisciplinary connections of gossip-based systems
ACM SIGOPS Operating Systems Review - Gossip-based computer networking
From fireflies to fault-tolerant swarms of robots
IEEE Transactions on Evolutionary Computation
A survey on bio-inspired networking
Computer Networks: The International Journal of Computer and Telecommunications Networking
Computer Networks: The International Journal of Computer and Telecommunications Networking
ECAL'09 Proceedings of the 10th European conference on Advances in artificial life: Darwin meets von Neumann - Volume Part I
A self-optimizing mobile network: Auto-tuning the network with firefly-synchronized agents
Information Sciences: an International Journal
ARCS'10 Proceedings of the 23rd international conference on Architecture of Computing Systems
Designing extreme distributed systems: challenges and opportunities
Proceedings of the 8th international ACM SIGSOFT conference on Quality of Software Architectures
Comparing different overlay topologies and metrics in pulse-coupled multi-agent systems
KES-AMSTA'12 Proceedings of the 6th KES international conference on Agent and Multi-Agent Systems: technologies and applications
Self-organizing synchronization with inhibitory-coupled oscillators: Convergence and robustness
ACM Transactions on Autonomous and Adaptive Systems (TAAS)
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Heartbeat synchronization strives to have nodes in a distributed system generate periodic, local "heartbeat events approximately at the same time. Many useful distributed protocols rely on the existence of such heartbeats for driving their cycle-based execution. Yet, solving the problem in environments where nodes are unreliable and messages are subject to delays and failures is non-trivial. We present a heartbeat synchronization protocol for overlay networks inspired by mathematical models of flash synchronization in certain species of fireflies. In our protocol, nodes send flash messages to their neighbors when a local heartbeat triggers. They adjust the phase of their next heartbeat based on incoming flash messages using an algorithm inspired by mathematical models of firefly synchronization. We report simulation results of the protocol in various realistic failure scenarios typical in overlay networks and show that synchronization emerges even when messages can have significant delay subject to large jitter.