Establishment of Upper Bounds for Internet Round Trip Message Latency

In this paper, we introduce a framework which can be used for establishing an upper bound on message latency, suitable for construction of Internet-based partially synchronous overlay networks. We propose two network filters for estimating the network states and implement them along with the five other network estimators proposed by other researchers. We monitor various Internet paths by measuring the Round Trip Time (RTT) and implement two different variable upper bound techniques which vary the bound according to the network state. The first technique computes the bound by calculating the product of some constant times the estimated RTT value, where as the second technique introduces a semi-upper bound region to determine the upper bound. We measure the performance of our system by using a five-metric evaluation model and show that the semi-upper bound technique along with the two proposed network filters exhibits better performance and can be effectively used for estimating upper bound on message latency. Finally, we use the phase-plot technique to determine the quality of the path and show that a low upper bound is sufficient for high quality paths.