Distributed Latency Estimation Using Global Knowledge For Mobile Collaborative Applications

Mobile collaborative applications are designed for close collaboration among mobile peers. The coordination of these applications is completely distributed using a global knowledge. There is no central controller or manager. In order to implement this coordination with a reasonable Quality of Service a sufficiently precise estimation of the transmission latency within the group is needed. Classical estimation approaches use a local clock to determine the latency for the next message to transfer. Due to the asynchronous nature of the applications, it is not possible to determine the timeout value in a distributed fashion based on latency estimation with classical approaches. In this paper, we propose a distributed latency estimation for mobile collaborative applications. We present five approaches to estimate the latency of group-communication-operations and compare their performance with that of Bertier. It shows that the Max-Estimator outperforms the other ones.