Multi-Party Set Reconciliation Using Characteristic Polynomials

Abstract: In the standard set reconciliation problem, there are two parties $A_1$ and $A_2$, each respectively holding a set of elements $S_1$ and $S_2$. The goal is for both parties to obtain the union $S_1 \cup S_2$. In many distributed computing settings the sets may be large but the set difference $|S_1-S_2|+|S_2-S_1|$ is small. In these cases one aims to achieve reconciliation efficiently in terms of communication; ideally, the communication should depend on the size of the set difference, and not on the size of the sets. Recent work has considered generalizations of the reconciliation problem to multi-party settings, using a framework based on a specific type of linear sketch called an Invertible Bloom Lookup Table. Here, we consider multi-party set reconciliation using the alternative framework of characteristic polynomials, which have previously been used for efficient pairwise set reconciliation protocols, and compare their performance with Invertible Bloom Lookup Tables for these problems.