Synergy: an overlay internetworking architecture

A multitude of overlay network designs for resilient routing, multicasting, quality of service, content distribution, storage, and object location have been recently proposed. Overlay networks offer several attractive features, including ease of deployment, flexibility, adaptivity, and an infrastructure for collaboration among hosts. In this paper, we explore cooperation among co-existing, possibly heterogeneous, overlay networks. We design Synergy, a utility-based overlay internetworking architecture that fosters overlay cooperation. Our architecture promotes fair peering relationships to achieve synergism. Results from Internet experiments with cooperative forwarding overlays indicate that our Synergy prototype improves delay, throughput, and loss performance, while maintaining the autonomy and heterogeneity of individual overlay networks.