Towards an end-to-end QoS Enabled Overlay Multicast Platform

Overlay networks are emerging as a platform to enhance the core network routing functionality. They form a new network layer on top of the Internet and offer a whole range of network enhancements, such as extra resilience, QoS (Quality of Service) support and overlay multicasting. This paper discusses how an overlay network is used to provide an end-toend QoS enabled multicast network. It describes how transparent access can be realized and contains a description of an overlay network access component that pushes traffic to the overlay layer, transparent for application and user. In addition to this, a number of algorithms have been developed for dynamically maintaining the overlay topology and for building a bounded delay overlay distribution tree for multi-party multimedia applications. These algorithms are evaluated and we show that we can establish a resilient overlay network in a scalable way and build overlay distribution trees of a low cost. Keywords—overlay networks, resilience, multicasting, overlay routing