Dynamic algorithms to provide a robust and scalable overlay routing service

Abstract

Service providers and companies wishing to connect a number of distributed sites need a QoS enabled and resilient network to provide their services. As network providers can not yet offer multidomain end-to-end QoS and Internet path outages can last several minutes, using Overlay Service Networks to route around congested or failing parts of the network is a hot topic in the research community. Typically a full mesh topology is used to connect the servers of the Overlay Service Network. Because this approach is not scalable, we propose to use a dynamic topology that is only a fraction of the full mesh. A novel algorithm that automatically reconfigures the topology when link outages or congestion occur is introduced. We have also developed an on-demand overlay routing algorithm that decreases the overlay network load. Through simulation it is shown that our algorithms allow to offer a robust routing service in a scalable way. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2006.