  Gossip protocols have been proposed as a robust and efficient method for
disseminating information throughout large-scale networks. In this paper, we
propose a compositional analysis technique to study formal probabilistic models
of gossip protocols expressed in a simple probabilistic timed process calculus
for wireless sensor networks. We equip the calculus with a simulation theory to
compare probabilistic protocols that have similar behaviour up to a certain
tolerance. The theory is used to prove a number of algebraic laws which
revealed to be very effective to estimate the performances of gossip networks,
with and without communication collisions, and randomised gossip networks. Our
simulation theory is an asymmetric variant of the weak bisimulation metric that
maintains most of the properties of the original definition. However, our
asymmetric version is particularly suitable to reason on protocols in which the
systems under consideration are not approximately equivalent, as in the case of
gossip protocols.
