The Scalable Weakly Consistent Infection-style Process Group Membership (SWIM) Protocol is a group membership protocol based on "outsourced heartbeats" [1] used in distributed systems, first introduced by Abhinandan Das, Indranil Gupta and Ashish Motivala in 2002. [2] [3] It is a hybrid algorithm which combines failure detection with group membership dissemination.
The protocol has two components, the Failure Detector Component and the Dissemination Component.
The Failure Detector Component functions as follows:
The Dissemination Component functions as follows:
The protocol provides the following guarantees:
The original SWIM paper lists the following extensions to make the protocol more robust: [2]