Cross-substrate Advertisement: Building Overlay Networks for Heterogeneous Environments

Abstract

Self-organizing overlay networks have emerged as a powerful paradigm for providing network services. While most approaches assume that overlay networks are built over a single substrate network, generally, the Internet, this thesis addresses the construction of overlay networks over multiple substrate networks. We present the design, implementation and evaluation of Cross-Substrate Advertisement (CSA) mechanisms for overlay networks over multiple heterogeneous substrate networks. A key difficulty arises from the more complex address bindings, since a single logical identifier is bound to multiple substrate addresses. We present mechanisms for exchanging information on address bindings and evaluate their effectiveness. The CSA mechanisms have been implemented in the HyperCast overlay protocol architecture, and have been evaluated in measurement experiments on an Emulab testbed. The experiments show that our CSA methods are effective in disseminating address information in large networks and are robust in the presence of network disruptions.