In the next generation Internet, the network will evolve from a plain communication medium into one that provides endless services to the users. These services will be composed of multiple cooperative distributed application elements. We name these services overlay applications. The cooperative application elements within an overlay application will build a dynamic communication mesh, namely an...

Implementing overlay software is non-trivial and time-consuming. Current projects build overlays or intermediate frameworks on top of low-level networking abstractions. This leads to far reaching incompatibilities between overlay implementations, tight coupling to frameworks and limited adaptability to different deployment environments. We present a new approach to rapid overlay implementation ...

Though the merits of IP-based multicast is undeniable, the deployment of IP multicast has met many difficulties. In the past several years, lots of research work have been done on overlay multicast (end-system multicast, application-layer multicast). In this paper, we propose a new overlay multicast protocol: HostCast. Besides constructing a data delivery tree, HostCast uses a simple and effici...

To enhance the performance of overlay multicast networks, the overlay multicast tree should be optimized. This optimization problem is a minimum diameter, degree-limited spanning tree (MDDLST) problem which is known to be NP-Hard. We present a new scheme to optimize an overlay multicast tree dynamically. Our algorithm can adapt the tree structure to the dynamic membership and network situation....

In the design and implementation of the overlay architecture most peer-to-peer (P2P) systems rely on the underlay network to provide them with basic connectivity. Therefore, the intrinsic features of the underlay network determine the efficiency of the overlay. Accordingly, studying the interdependency of the overlay and underlay networks leads to a better understanding of P2P behaviour. We pre...

Recent years have seen a tremendous growth of interests in streaming continuous media such as video data over the Internet. This would create an enormous increase in the demand on various server and networking resources. To minimize service delays and to reduce loads placed on these resources, we propose an Overlay Caching Scheme (OCS) for overlay networks. OCS utilizes virtual cache structures...

Overlay networks create new networking services using nodes that communicate using pre-existing networks. They are often optimized for specific applications and targeted at niche vertical domains, but lack interoperability with which their functionalities can be shared. MOSAIC is a declarative platform for constructing new overlay networks from multiple existing overlays, each possessing a subs...