Application layer switching: a deployable technique for providing quality of service

We propose a deployable approach to improving QoS by using the familiar overlay architecture approach. The goals of this work are: (1) to create an overlay architecture which allows us to sample specific path quality metrics among different paths; (2) to utilize the proposed overlay architecture in order to implement our proposed QoS-based routing scheme, application layer switching (ALSW). We show that we are able to achieve better than best-effort QoS without modifying intermediate nodes (i.e., routers), thus encouraging immediate deployment. Additionally, this research is performed on an actual wide area network testbed, comprised of universities across the nation. Also, we assemble this architecture as a peer-to-peer framework, encouraging collaborating individuals with average workstations to improve the QoS of their traffic.