Analyzing the exhaustiveness of the Synapse protocol

The Synapse protocol is a scalable protocol designed for information retrieval over inter-connected heterogeneous overlay networks. In this paper, we give a formal description of Synapse using the Abstract State Machines framework. The formal description pertains to Synapse actions that manipulate distributed keys. Based on this formal description, we present results concerning the expected exhaustiveness for a number of scenarios and systems maintained by the Synapse protocol, and provide comparisons to the results of the corresponding simulations and experiments. We show that the predicted theoretical results match the obtained experimental results, and give recommendations on the design of systems using Synapse.