Multiset Synchronization with Counting Cuckoo Filters

Set synchronization is a fundamental task in distributed applications and implementations. Existing methods that synchronize simple sets are mainly based on compact data structures such as Bloom filter and its variants. However, these methods are infeasible to synchronize a pair of multisets which allow an element to appear for multiple times. To this end, in this paper, we propose to leverage the counting cuckoo filter (CCF), a novel variant of cuckoo filter, to represent and thereafter synchronize a pair of multisets. The cuckoo filter (CF) is a minimized hash table that uses cuckoo hashing to resolve collisions. CF has an array of buckets, each of which has multiple slots to store element fingerprints. Based on CF, CCF extends each slot as two fields, the fingerprint field and the counter field. The fingerprint field records the fingerprint of element which is stored by this slot; while the counter field counts the multiplicity of the stored element. With such a design, CCF is competent to represent any multiset. After generating and exchanging the respective CCFs which represent the local multi-sets, we propose the query-based and the decoding-based methods to identify the different elements between the given multisets. The comprehensive evaluation results indicate that CCF outperforms the counting Bloom filter (CBF) when they are used to synchronize multisets, in terms of both synchronization accuracy and the space-efficiency, at the cost of a little higher time-consumption

Optimizing Bloom Filter: Challenges, Solutions, and Comparisons

Bloom filter (BF) has been widely used to support membership query, i.e., to judge whether a given element x is a member of a given set S or not. Recent years have seen a flourish design explosion of BF due to its characteristic of space-efficiency and the functionality of constant-time membership query. The existing reviews or surveys mainly focus on the applications of BF, but fall short in covering the current trends, thereby lacking intrinsic understanding of their design philosophy. To this end, this survey provides an overview of BF and its variants, with an emphasis on the optimization techniques. Basically, we survey the existing variants from two dimensions, i.e., performance and generalization. To improve the performance, dozens of variants devote themselves to reducing the false positives and implementation costs. Besides, tens of variants generalize the BF framework in more scenarios by diversifying the input sets and enriching the output functionalities. To summarize the existing efforts, we conduct an in-depth study of the existing literature on BF optimization, covering more than 60 variants. We unearth the design philosophy of these variants and elaborate how the employed optimization techniques improve BF. Furthermore, comprehensive analysis and qualitative comparison are conducted from the perspectives of BF components. Lastly, we highlight the future trends of designing BFs. This is, to the best of our knowledge, the first survey that accomplishes such goals