On the Influence of Latency Estimation on Dynamic Group Communication using Overlays

Distributed interactive applications tend to have stringent latency requirements and some may have high bandwidth demands. Many of them have also very dynamic user groups for which all-to-all communication is needed. In online multiplayer games, for example, such groups are determined through region-of-interest management in the application. We have investigated a variety of group management approaches for overlay networks in earlier work and shown that several useful tree heuristics exist. However, these heuristics require full knowledge of all overlay link latencies. Since this is not scalable, we investigate the effects that latency estimation techniques have on the quality of overlay tree constructions. We do this by evaluating one example of our group management approaches in Planetlab and examining how latency estimation techniques influence their quality. Specifically, we investigate how two well-known latency estimation techniques, Vivaldi and Netvigator, affect the quality of tree building.