Overlay-Friendly Native Network: A Contradiction in Terms?

It is a widely accepted notion that the native layer of the current Internet has begun to stagnate in terms of the services offered. Consequently, overlay networks have gained attention as a viable alternative to overcome functionality limitations of the Internet. A common approach to overlay network design holds the native network inviolable, implying that the overlay has to take on all the tasks needed to provide the desired high-level services. This limits the performance achieved and can potentially overburden the overlay layer. To solve these problems, we envision that, as overlay applications proliferate, the native layer should gradually evolve to suit the overlay network requirements. This paper proposes a framework for such an overlay-friendly native network (OFNN), which will cater to the overlay applications without compromising on the performance of the non-overlay applications. However, it is arguable that such a modification to the native network is contradictory to the fundamental reason overlay networks were conceived. We address this argument in our paper and classify the OFNN approaches as contradictory or non-contradictory based on whether the native layer modification is invasive or not. Further, we discuss the option of tuning the native layer parameters as a simple, yet feasible, non-contradictory OFNN approach. As examples, we present the overlay-friendly tuning of the native layer IGP hello-interval, BGP MED attribute and IGP cost.