BLOR: An efficient bandwidth and latency sensitive overlay routing approach for flash data dissemination

The problem of flash data dissemination refers to transmitting time-critical data to a large group of distributed receivers in a timely manner, which widely exists in many mission-critical applications and Web services. However, existing approaches for flash data dissemination fail to ensure the timely and efficient transmission, because of the unpredictability of the dissemination process. Overlay routing has been widely used as an efficient routing primitive for providing better end-to-end routing quality by detouring inefficient routing paths in the real networks. To improve the predictability of the flash data dissemination process, we propose a bandwidth and latency sensitive overlay routing approach named BLOR, by optimizing the overlay routing and avoiding inefficient paths in flash data dissemination. BLOR tries to select optimal routing paths in terms of network latency, bandwidth capacity, and available bandwidth in nature, which has never been studied before. Additionally, a location-aware unstructured overlay topology construction algorithm, an unbiased top-k dominance model, and an efficient semi-distributed information management strategy are proposed to assist the routing optimization of BLOR. Extensive experiments have been conducted to verify the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposals with real-world data sets. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.