Panorama: Optimizing Internet-scale Users’ Routes from End to End

Network performance is critical to the user experience of many real-time interactive applications, such as video conferencing and live streaming. Empirical studies show that transport latency over 300ms would become unacceptable, leading to significant user satisfaction declining. Unfortunately, due to the best-effort nature of Internet, such strict performance requirement can hardly be fully met. Despite continuous efforts have been made to improve the performance of Internet (e.g., overlay routing optimization, traffic engineering and content delivery network), we are still far from delivering satisfying network performance for these applications. The stringent network requirements, the world-wide cross-continental network transfers, and the large-scale Internet-wide users, together make it a complex challenge to deliver ideal user experience for emerging real-time interactive applications.

In this paper, we present Panorama, a scalable system for delivering desired user experience to real-time interactive applications over a globally distributed overlay network. To achieve ideal user experience, Panorama takes a centralized approach to do global end-to-end traffic engineering optimization, and overcomes the scalability issue by intelligent measurement-based user grouping and scalable, parallelizable route computation. Panorama has been deployed in a large global real-time overlay network since 2021. We evaluate Panorama based on 81 million selected real-world traces in deployment environment with clients across 66 countries. The extensive evaluation demonstrates that Panorama can support a routing service for millions of users, while providing latency lower than 200ms for 96.34% of the communication sessions, and improving SLA satisfaction by up to 88.0%.