On Topological Design of Service Overlay Networks

The notion of service overlay network (SON) was proposed recently to alleviate difficulties encountered in providing end-to-end quality of service (QoS) guarantees in the current Internet architecture. The SONs are able to provide QoS guarantees by purchasing bandwidth from individual network domains and building a logical end-to-end data delivery infrastructure on top of existing Internet. In this paper, we consider a generalized framework for SON, which is categorized based on three different characteristics: a) single-homed/multi-homed end-system b) usage-based/leased cost model and c) capacitated/uncapacitated network. We focus on the algorithmic analysis of the topology design problem for the above generalized SON. We prove that for certain case, polynomial-time optimal algorithm exists, while for other cases, the topology design problem is NP-complete. For the NP-complete cases, we provide approximation algorithms and experimental results.