A Service-Oriented Framework of Distributed QoS Measurement Based on Multi-Agent for Overlay Network

Recently, overlay network is increasingly popular as a means to enhance end-to-end application performance and availability. It is a virtual network constructed over the underlying Internet infrastructure by the end systems(i.e. hosts or servers), and provides some special services. The best predominance is that overlay network can be deployed rapidly, economically and flexibly without changing the underlying communication infrastructure. Because of its advantages, more and more applications are emerged on overlay network. To suit a overlay network dynamically, knowledge about network characteristics(i.e. quality of service(QoS)) is necessary for overlay network applications. Overlay network applications can use the characteristics to recover from path outages and periods of degraded performance of overlay network. However, the measurement of such characteristics is often a burden on the overlay network applications because it is not their intended purpose. So as one solution to this problem, this paper presents a service-oriented QoS measurement framework through the introduction of multi-agent technology. The framework is distributed, scalable and cooperative, and it can provide a independent service for overlay network applications that measures the QoS parameters.