We propose a new genre of overlay network for disseminating information from popular but resource constrained sources. We call this communication primitive as Latency Gradated Overlay, where information consumers selforganize themselves according to their individual resource constraints and the latency they are willing to tolerate in receiving the information from the source. Such a communication primitive finds immediate use in applications like RSS feeds aggregation. We propose heuristic algorithms to construct LagOver based on preferably some partial knowledge of the network at users (no knowledge slows the construction process) but no global coordination. The algorithms are evaluated based on simulations and show good characteristics including convergence, satisfying peers’ latency and bandwidth constraints even in presence of moderately high membership dynamics. There are two points worth noting. First, optimizing jointly for latency and capacity (i.e., placing nodes that have...
Anwitaman Datta, Ion Stoica, Michael J. Franklin