A Resilient Overlay Network (RON) is an architecture that allows distributed Internet applications to detect and recover from path outages and periods of degraded performance within several seconds, improving over today’s wide-area routing protocols that take at least several minutes to recover. A RON is an application-layer overlay on top of the existing Internet routing substrate. The RON nodes monitor the functioning and quality of the Internet paths among themselves, and use this information to decide whether to route packets directly over the Internet or by way of other RON nodes, optimizing application-specific routing metrics. Results from two sets of measurements of a working RON deployed at sites scattered across the Internet demonstrate the benefits of our architecture. For instance, over a 64-hour sampling period in March 2001 across a twelve-node RON, there were 32 significant outages, each lasting over thirty minutes, over the 132 measured paths. RON’s routing mechanism was able to detect, recover, and route around all of them, in less than twenty seconds on average, showing that its methods for fault detection and recovery work well at discovering alternate paths in the Internet. Furthermore, RON was able to improve the loss rate, latency, or throughput perceived by data transfers; for example, about 5 % of the transfers doubled their TCP throughput and 5 % of our transfers saw their loss probability reduced by 0.05. We found that forwarding packets via at most one intermediate RON node is sufficient to overcome faults and improve performance in most cases. These improvements, particularly in the area of fault detection and recovery, demonstrate the benefits of moving some of the control over routing into the hands of end-systems.

Graphs are commonly used to model the structure of internetworks, for the study of problems ranging from routing to resource reservation. A variety of graph models are found in the literature, including regular topologies such as rings or stars, "well-known" topologies such as the original ARPAnet, and randomly generated topologies. Less common is any discussion of how closely these models correlate with real network topologies. We consider the problem of efficiently generating graph models that accurately reflect the topological properties of real internetworks. We compare properties of graphs generated using various methods with those of real internets. We also propose efficient methods for generating topologies with particular properties, including a Transit-Stub model that correlates well with Internet structure. Improved models for internetwork structure have the potential to impact the significance of simulation studies of internetworking solutions, providing basis for the validi...

Graphs are commonly used to model the topological structure of internetworks, to study problems ranging from routing to resource reservation. A variety of graphs are found in the literature, including fixed topologies such as rings or stars, "well-known" topologies such as the ARPAnet, and randomly generated topologies. While many researchers rely upon graphs for analytic and simulation studies, there has been little analysis of the implications of using a particular model, or how the graph generation method may a ect the results of such studies. Further, the selection of one generation method over another is often arbitrary, since the differences and similarities between methods are not well understood. This paper considers the problem of generating and selecting graph models that reflect the properties of real internetworks. We review generation methods in common use, and also propose several new methods. We consider a set of metrics that characterize the graphs produced by a method, and we quantify similarities and differences amongst several generation methods with respect to these metrics. We also consider the effect of the graph model in the context of a speciffic problem, namely multicast routing.

This paper presents the design of a new Internet routing architecture (NIRA). In today’s Internet, users can pick their own ISPs, but once the packets have entered the network, the users have no control over the overall routes their packets take. NIRA aims at providing end users the ability to choose the sequence of Internet service providers a packet traverses. User choice fosters competition, which imposes an economic discipline on the market, and fosters innovation and the introduction of new services. This paper explores various technical problems that would have to be solved to give users the ability to choose: how a user discovers routes and whether the dynamic conditions of the routes satisfy his requirements, how to efficiently represent routes, and how to properly compensate providers if a user chooses to use them. In particular, NIRA utilizes a hierarchical provider-rooted addressing scheme so that a common type of domainlevel route can be efficiently represented by a pair of addresses. In NIRA, each user keeps track of the topology information on domains that provide transit service for him. A source retrieves the topology information of the destination on demand and combines this information with his own to discover end-to-end routes. This route discovery process ensures that each user does not need to know the complete topology of the Internet.

In this paper, we motivate and describe the architecture of Resilient Overlay Networks (RON), an application-level packet forwarding service that gives end-hosts and applications the ability to take advantage of network paths that traditional Internet routing cannot make use of, thereby improving their end-to-end reliability and performance. A RON system consists of a per-host forwarding and routing system; programs to measure the quality of paths between participating hosts; and mechanisms for interpreting this measured data and making routing decisions based upon that interpretation. RONs are usable as a purely user-level library system, with kernel support for packet encapsulation, or as a router to overlay entire leaf networks. We explain the reasons for the architectural design of RON, and argue that end-host controlled Resilient Overlay Networks provide a good framework for distributed applications to transmit data with greater robustness and higher performance over the wide-area...

Abstract not found

A Resilient Overlay Network (RON) is an architecture that allows distributed Internet applications to detect and recover from path outages and periods of degraded performance within several seconds, improving over today's wide-area routing protocols that take at least several minutes to recover. A RON is an application-layer overlay on top of the existing Internet routing substrate. The RON nodes monitor the functioning and quality of the Internet paths among themselves, and use this information to decide whether to route packets directly over the Internet or by way of other RON nodes, optimizing application-specific routing metrics. Results from two sets of measurements of a working RON deployed at sites scattered across the Internet demonstrate the benefits of our architecture. For instance, over a 64-hour sampling period in March 2001 across a twelve-node RON, there were 32 significant outages, each lasting over thirty minutes, over the 132 measured paths. RON's routing mechanism was able to detect, recover, and route around all of them, in less than twenty seconds on average, showing that its methods for fault detection and recovery work well at discovering alternate paths in the Internet. Furthermore, RON was able to improve the loss rate, latency, or throughput perceived by data transfers; for example, about 5% of the transfers doubled their TCP throughput and 5% of our transfers saw their loss probability reduced by 0.05. We found that forwarding packets via at most one intermediate RON node is sufficient to overcome faults and improve performance in most cases. These improvements, particularly in the area of fault detection and recovery, demonstrate the benefits of moving some of the control over routing into the hands of end-systems.