A Distributed Processing Communication Scheme for Real-Time Applications over Wide-Area Networks

Low-delay networking and edge computing will enable mission-critical applications to be delivered over wide-area networks. We consider this trend to be the realization that all users can share an application space without feeling any distance difference. We propose a distributed processing scheme that keeps the order of event occurrence regardless of the distance between users and an application server. The proposed scheme can be applied to both optimistic synchronization algorithms (OSA) and conservative synchronization algorithms (CSA). In the proposed scheme, arrival events with a delay within a predefined set time (correction time) are sorted in order of occurrence before application processing. We formulate the proposed scheme as an integer linear programming (ILP) problem. The objective function of ILP consists of the number of users excluded from the delay quality, the amount of memory consumed for a rollback in OSA, and the maximum end-to-end delay. The three parts of the objective function are set weight and the sum of parts with weight is minimized. We evaluate the proposed scheme for 1000 users distributed in two types of network models. Numerical results indicate that the proposed scheme reduces memory consumption compared to that of the conventional OSA scheme. The proposed scheme works as CSA in which all events are sorted in the occurrence order if the correction time is set above the delay for the slowest event to arrive at the server.