Application-aware Overlay Networks for Data Dissemination

XPORT (eXtensible Profile-driven Overlay Routing Trees) is a generic data dissemination system that supports an extensible set of data types and profiles, and an optimization framework that facilitates easy specification of a wide range of useful performance goals. XPORT implements a tree-based overlay network, which can be customized per application using a small number of methods that encapsulate application-specific data-profile matching, profile aggregation, and cost optimization logic. The clean separation between the "plumbing" and "application" enables XPORT to uniformly and easily support disparate dissemination-based applications, such as content-based data dissemination and multicast-based content distribution. In this short paper, we provide a high-level overview of XPORT. We also discuss its current implementation status, applications we built using XPORT, and some preliminary experimental results from the prototype. We finalize the paper by summarizing our future directions