Quantitative Analysis of Gossiping Protocols Boudewijn R. Haverkort Centre for Telematics and Information Technology University of Twente Enschede, Netherlands brh@cs.utwente.nl Markus Siegle Institut f r Technische Informatik u Universit t der Bundeswehr a M nchen, Germany u markus.siegle@unibw.de Maarten van Steen Dept. of Computer Science Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Netherlands steen@cs.vu.nl 1. BACKGROUND 3. AN OPEN CRITIQUE Welcome to this special issue on quantitative analysis of gossiping protocols! This issue is one of the concrete results of the workshop œTwo Decades of Probabilistic Veri cation “ Re ‚ections and Perspectives  organized by the VOSS-2 project [5] in November 2007 at the Lorentz centre in Leiden [3]. The area of gossiping protocols was chosen as a common case study by the workshop organisers, since it is a novel application eld and especially challenging with respect to the scalability of evaluation techniques. This choice had also been inspired by a previous successful Lorentz workshop, on gossiping protocols, hosted in December 2006 [4, 2]. Well before the 2007 workshop, all participantss were informed about this choice and were provided with background reading material [1]. At the workshop, in an invited presentation, Maarten van Steen presented the principles of gossiping protocols and systems and showed that, until then, primarily simulation and prototyping were used for their evaluation. After the presentation, a handful of teams were formed (spontaneously), who tried to attack the presented evaluation challenges by using probabilistic veri cation techniques. Later during the workshop, rst ideas on evaluation and veri cation approaches were presented. Motivated by these presentations, we decided to investigate the possibility of putting together a special issue of ACM Performance Evaluation Review, similar in vein to the earlier special issue of ACM Operating Systems Review dedicated to the Lorentz workshop on gossiping protocols [2]. We are very happy and thankful that the editor, Evgenia Smirni (College of William and Mary), was also excited by this idea and gave us the chance to put this idea into practice. In the editorial to a special issue, one normally expects to nd a short summary of the papers comprising the issue, written by the guest editors. However, since two of the guest editors are also involved as author of papers, we decided to follow a di €erent path. We asked Joost-Pieter Katoen (RWTH Aachen), who also participated in the Lorentz workshop but who did not submit a paper, to write an œopen critique  about the four accepted papers, in which he addresses, in a very nice and readable way, the concept of gossiping protocols, as well as the merits and challenges he sees, as veri cation expert, in these papers. We believe that his critique adds signi cantly to the papers themselves, by putting them in a broader perspective and by pointing to the key challenges ahead. 4.

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