GLIDS: A Global Latency Information Dissemination System

TL;DR

GLIDS introduces a system for disseminating propagation latency information in path-aware networks, enabling latency-aware path selection for latency-sensitive applications without extensive real-time measurements.

Contribution

The paper proposes GLIDS, a novel system for global dissemination of propagation latency data, improving latency-aware routing in path-aware networks.

Findings

Enables latency-aware path selection before data transmission.

Addresses challenges of measuring all paths in large networks.

Facilitates new use cases through latency transparency.

Abstract

A recent advance in networking is the deployment of path-aware multipath network architectures, where network endpoints are given multiple network paths to send their data on. In this work, we tackle the challenge of selecting paths for latency-sensitive applications. Even today's path-aware networks, which are much smaller than the current Internet, already offer dozens and in several cases over a hundred paths to a given destination, making it impractical to measure all path latencies to find the lowest latency path. Furthermore, for short flows, performing latency measurements may not provide benefits as the flow may finish before completing the measurements. To overcome these issues, we argue that endpoints should be provided with a latency estimate before sending any packets, enabling latency-aware path choice for the first packet sent. As we cannot predict the end-to-end latency due to dynamically changing queuing delays, we measure and disseminate the propagation latency, enabling novel use cases and solving concrete problems in current network protocols. We present the Global Latency Information Dissemination System (GLIDS), which is a step toward global latency transparency through the dissemination of propagation latency information.