Towards Latency-Optimal Distributed Relay Selection

Latency-sensitive multiparty applications involve intensive communication between multiple participating nodes. Relays are usually adopted for matchmaking end hosts, filtering unwanted traffics, bypassing routing outages and so on. Speeding up the relay-communication becomes increasingly important to improve the QoE of clients. Currently, no rigorous guarantees have been made for the latency-optimal relay communication. We propose a novel framework to truthfully represent the relay communication in the latency space. Real-world data sets show that nearly 90% of node triples obey the average triangle inequality, while our new model allows for the asymmetry and triangle inequality violations to occur. We propose the general triangle to rigorously locate a candidate relay closer to multiple nodes, with which we systematically analyze the feasibility of finding an optimal relay node for arbitrarily sized groups. Our results show that distributed greedy methods are able to locate optimal relays with modest communication overhead and small search hops.