Tarantula: Towards an Accurate Network Coordinate System by Handling Major Portion of TIVs

Network Coordinate (NC) systems provide an efficient and scalable mechanism to estimate latencies among hosts. However, many popular algorithms like Vivaldi suffer greatly from the existence of Triangle Inequality Violations (TIVs). Two-layer systems like Pharos and hierarchical Vivaldi have been proposed to remedy the impact of TIVs. They divide the whole space into several location-based clusters and run NC systems on both global layer and local layer. However, the two-layer model is only able to optimize the intra-cluster links relating to a limited portion of TIV triangles. In this paper, we propose a new NC system, Tarantula, which divides the space in a novel way. By categorizing the TIVs into three classes, we show that Tarantula handles a much larger portion of existing TIVs than two-layer systems. Moreover, we present two techniques to further strengthen the Tarantula system: 1) relate the updating step size in the Vivaldi algorithm used in Tarantula to ground-truth latency so as to improve the prediction for short links; 2) propose Dynamic Cluster Optimization to dynamically adjust clustering of hosts. Our experimental results show that Tarantula outperforms Pharos and Vivaldi significantly in terms of estimation accuracy. When implementing different NC systems in the application of server selection and detour finding, Tarantula again performs the best.