Preference-aware overlay topologies for group communication

We consider heterogeneous group communication in which users have different preference for information related to various topics. The problem of disseminating such information to interested set of users in an overlay network is challenging when both low end-to-end latency and low incurred overlay traffic are desired. We investigate heuristic based overlay topology generation algorithm that exploits both network proximity in underlying network and similarity between users' preferences to reduce both the overlay latency and the amount of data forwarding done by nodes that do not prefer the data. Our results show that while these requirements conflict, an application specific tradeoff can be made to improve the overall system performance. © 2005 IEEE.