Cooperative overlay routing in a multiple overlay environment

Overlay networks have been widely developed over the past few years. More and more overlays are deployed on the top of the same native network, and share the same physical resources. Competing for these physical resources, co-existing overlays may affect each other adversely. It has been showed that by using selfish overlay routing, co-existing overlays would be likely to converge to a Nash equilibrium which is sub-optimal. However, to achieve the global optimal may also cause the performance degradation of certain overlays, which make it hard to realize. Inspired by the Nash bargaining solution, a cooperative method is proposed for two co-existing overlays to achieve a near Pareto optimal. Simulations are performed to evaluate the proposed approach. The results show that the approach is effective and efficient in the multiple overlay networks environment.