Question

I’ve been studying the PeerChannel in WCF. The docs indicate that a peer will automatically try to get between 3 and 7 connected neighbors.

My scenario is a couple of systems on one side of an expensive, high-latency connection; and one or more on the other side.

Since the connection has limited bandwidth, I’d really like to keep control of how many connections are made across this precious resource.

The topology is something like this:

                                       (c)
a    (precious bandwidth connection)    |
| <-----------------------------------> d
b            (high latency)             |
                                       (e)

1. Is there really nothing I can do to keep the links across the precious link at one or two?
2. Will the PeerChannel consider the latency when choosing which neighbors it allows?
3. Is there anything I can do to encourage the WCF PeerChannel to keep the neighbors across the precious link to a minimum?

Answer 1

As expected, there is really nothing a programmer can do to control the construction of the mesh, which is probably for the best.

I figured out that I could achieve the result I wanted by having a mesh between a-b, and a mesh between c-d-e. Then a seperate mesh whose purpose is to act as a repeater across the precious connection which only connects 1 host from a-b and 1 host from c-d-e.

Something like this:

                (AC mesh)
         a----------------------c
(AB mesh)|   (precious link)    |
         b                      d  (CDE mesh)
                                |
                                e