Short communication. Improving overlay handlers

Code overlay segments are commonly used to implement large program modules on machines with limited address space. Unfortunately, these systems usually impose some limitations on the permissible sequence of subroutine invocations. This paper discusses the reasons for these limitations and introduces a simple change that allows more general invocation sequences to be used.     

Network-aware service placement and selection algorithms on large-scale overlay networks

Currently many service providers offer their services on a private and proprietary hard- and software infrastructure. These infrastructures often share many similarities. Hence we believe a generic service management architecture, that allows service providers to offer a large array of different services on a single infrastructure or multiple providers to offer their services cooperatively, would provide many advantages over current silo-based approaches. Additionally, by allowing the distributed service management components to cooperate in a peer-to-peer overlay network, scalability and resilience of the system could be greatly improved.In this paper we propose an optimal algorithm, based on an integer linear programming (ILP) formulation, and several heuristics to support such a generic overlay-based service management architecture. More specifically, we propose algorithms for dynamically allocating server and network resources to a set of services and selecting a suitable service instance for each client. Service instances are placed on a set of servers, taking into account server resource constraints (e.g. CPU and memory). Unlike existing algorithms for this problem, those proposed in this paper also support service level agreements (SLAs), which take the form of Quality of Service demands such as transmission latency constraints and bandwidth requirements. The optimisation goal is to maximise the percentage of satisfied demand (answered requests) and minimise the total number of required overlay servers, while satisfying the SLAs and resource constraints. Additionally, we propose an extension that allows the algorithms to find overlay routing paths to improve the transmission latency for latency-sensitive services.Extensive simulations were performed to evaluate the performance and scalability of the heuristics. They showed that in many cases the heuristics perform close to optimal and they scale well in terms of network size.     

Tree-assisted gossiping for overlay video distribution

Given its readily deployable nature and broad applications for digital entertainment, video streaming through overlay networks has received much attention recently. While a tree topology is often advocated due to its scalability, it suffers from discontinuous playback under highly dynamic network environments. For on-demand streaming, the asynchronicity among client requests further aggravates the problem. On the other hand, gossip protocols using random message dissemination, though robust, fail to meet the real-time constraints for streaming applications. In this paper, we propose TAG, a Tree-Assisted Gossip protocol that addresses the above issues. TAG adopts a tree structure with time indexing to accommodate asynchronous requests, and an efficient pull-based gossip algorithm to mitigate the impact of network dynamicity. It seamlessly integrates these two approaches and realizes their best features, namely, low delay with a regular tree topology, and robust delivery with smart switching among multiple paths, thus making effective use of the available bandwidth in the network. We evaluate the performance of TAG under various settings, and the results demonstrate that it is quite robust in the presence of local and global bandwidth fluctuations. As compared to pure tree-based overlay VOD system, it achieves much lower and stable segment missing rates, even under highly dynamic network conditions.This research is supported by a Canadian NSERC Discovery Grant, an NSERC RTI Grant, a CFI New Oppurtunities Grant, and an SFU President's Research Grant.The author names are in alphabetical order.     

Optimizing self-organizing overlay network using evolutionary approach

Self-organizing overlay networks are emerging as next generation networks capable of adapting to the needs of applications at runtime. Applications performance significantly depends on the structure and behaviors of the underlying self-organizing overlay networks. To achieve desired performance, not only the logical overlay topology but also the behaviors of nodes in this overlay network need to be optimized. Moreover, self-organizing overlay networks are extremely dynamic, unreliable and often large-scale. It is therefore important to design new optimizing approaches to meet these challenges. In this paper, we present an evolutionary optimization methodology for self-organizing overlay network. The optimizations of self-organizing overlay networks are modeled as dynamically evolutionary process, in which the nodes interact with each other, change their internal structures and alter their external links to improve the collective performance. To design appropriate fitness functions and rules that guides the direction of the evolution, overlay network can reach a stable state with desired global application performance eventually. Such a methodology leads to our distributed algorithms for proximity-based overlay topology maintenance and Peer-to-Peer living media streaming, in which every node in the overlay network rewires their behaviors and connectivity according to local available information and embedded rules. These algorithms are shown to perform well using simulations.     

An adaptive overlay network inspired by social behaviour

Nature is a great source of inspiration for scientists, because natural systems seem to be able to find the best way to solve a given problem by using simple and robust mechanisms. Studying complex natural systems, scientists usually find that simple local dynamics lead to sophisticated macroscopic structures and behaviour. It seems that some kind of local interaction rules naturally allow the system to auto-organize itself as an efficient and robust structure, which can easily solve different tasks. Examples of such complex systems are social networks, where a small set of basic interaction rules leads to a relatively robust and efficient communication structure. In this paper, we present PROSA, a semantic peer-to-peer (P2P) overlay network inspired by social dynamics. The way queries are forwarded and links among peers are established in PROSA resemble the way people ask other people for collaboration, help or information. Behaving as a social network of peers, PROSA naturally evolves to a small world, where all peers can be reached in a fast and efficient way. The underlying algorithm used for query forwarding, based only on local choices, is both reliable and effective: peers sharing similar resources are eventually connected with each other, allowing queries to be successfully answered in a really small amount of time. The resulting emergent structure can guarantee fast responses and good query recall.     

Predictable service overlay networks: Predictability through adaptive monitoring and efficient overlay construction and management

Providing bounded communication among participating nodes is significant for distributed systems. Internet-based applications suffer with lower performance due to absence of bounded latency. We describe PSON, an overlay network solution to this challenging problem. PSON has two components. The monitoring component, SyncProbe, utilizes efficient and adaptive monitoring techniques to measure latency, detect packet loss, and provide real-time estimates of maximum expected latency along paths of an Internet substrate. The QoSMap component constructs and manages overlay such that it yields application-level QoS and provides resilience against network failures. A distinctive feature of QoSMap is construction of QoS-compliant backup paths which facilitate in overlay management and operation during the period when primary overlay paths violate QoS. We evaluate PSON on PlanetLab to provide predictable communication for applications with different topology and QoS requirement. Our experiments confirm the effectiveness of PSON in providing an inexpensive and efficient application-layer solution to Internet’s unpredictable behavior.     

On the interaction of multiple overlay routing

In the past few years, overlay networks have received much attention but there has been little study on the “interaction” of multiple, co-existing overlays on top of a physical network. In addition to previously introduced concept of overlay routing strategy such as selfish routing, we introduce a new strategy called “overlay optimal routing”. Under this routing policy, the overlay seeks to minimize its weighted average delay by splitting its traffic onto multiple paths. We establish that (i) the overlay optimal routing can achieve better delay compared to selfish routing and (ii) there exists a Nash equilibrium when multiple overlays adopt this strategy. Although an equilibrium point exists for overlay optimal routing and possibly for selfish routing, we show that the interaction of multiple overlay routing may not be Pareto optimal and that some fairness anomalies of resource allocation may occur. This is worthy of attention since overlay may not know the existence of other overlays and they will continue to operate at this sub-optimal point. We explore two pricing schemes to resolve the above issues. We show that by incorporating a proper pricing scheme, the overlay routing game can be led to the desired equilibrium and avoid the problems mentioned above. Extensive fluid-based simulations are performed to support the theoretical claims.     

Multicast tree rearrangement to recover node failures in overlay multicast networks

Overlay multicast makes use of the Internet as a low level infrastructure to provide multicast service to end hosts. The strategy of overlay multicast slides over most of the basic deployment issues associated with IP multicast, such as end-to-end reliability, flow and congestion control, and assignment of an unique address for each multicasting group.     

On the establishment of distinct identities in overlay networks

We study ways to restrict or prevent the damage that can be caused in a peer-to-peer network by corrupt entities creating multiple pseudonyms. We show that it is possible to remotely issue certificates that can be used to test the distinctness of identities. Our certification protocols are based on geometric techniques that establish location information in a fault-tolerant and distributed fashion. They do not rely on a centralized certifying authority or infrastructure that has direct knowledge of entities in the system, and work in Euclidean or spherical geometry of arbitrary dimension. They tolerate corrupt entities, including corrupt certifiers, collusion by either certification applicants or certifiers, and either a broadcast or point-to-point message model. The second author was supported in part by the NSF Grant CCR-0209138.     

OCS: An effective caching scheme for video streaming on overlay networks

Video streaming is vital for many important applications such as distance learning, digital video libraries, and movie-on-demand. Since video streaming requires significant server and networking resources, caching has been used to reduce the demand on these resources. In this paper, we propose a novel collaboration scheme for video caching on overlay networks, called Overlay Caching Scheme (OCS), to further minimize service delays and loads placed on an overlay network for video streaming applications. OCS is not a centralized nor a hierarchical collaborative scheme. Despite its design simplicity, OCS effectively uses an aggregate storage space and capability of distributed overlay nodes to cache popular videos and serve nearby clients. Moreover, OCS is light-weight and adaptive to clients’ locations and request patterns. We also investigate other video caching techniques for overlay networks including both collaborative and non-collaborative ones. Compared with these techniques on topologies inspired from actual networks, OCS offers extremely low average service delays and approximately half the server load. OCS also offers smaller network load in most cases in our study.

DAg-stream: Distributed video adaptation for overlay streaming to heterogeneous devices

Combining the advantages of Peer-to-Peer (P2P) content distribution concept and metadata driven adaptation of videos in compressed domain, in this paper, we propose a simple but scalable design of distributed adaptation and overlay streaming using MPEG-21 gBSD, called DAg-stream. The objective is not only to shift the bandwidth burden to end participating peers, but also to move the computation load for adapting video contents away from dedicated media-streaming/adaptation servers. It is an initiative to merge the adaptation operations and the P2P streaming basics to support the expansion of context-aware mobile P2P systems. DAg-stream organizes mobile and heterogeneous peers into overlays. For each video, a separate overlay is formed. No control message is exchanged among peers for overlay maintenance. We present a combination of infrastructure-centric and application end-point architecture. The infrastructure-centric architecture refers to a tree controller, named DAg-master, which is responsible for tree/overlay administering and maintenance. The application end-point architecture refers to video sharing, streaming and adaptation by the participating resourceful peers. The motivation for this work is based on the experiences and lessons learned so far about developing a video adaptation system for heterogeneous devices. In this article, we present our architecture and some experimental evaluations supporting the design concept for overlay video streaming and online adaptation.

P2P分布式存储系统

设计了一个基于P2P的分布式存储系统.该存储系统采用高可扩展的P2P体系结构,将大量分散的节点组织成一个逻辑网络,充分利用原先被忽视的端系统资源,构建大规模分布式存储系统.该存储系统采用高效的结构化P2P路由机制、动态自适应的副本管理、信任机制和激励机制为用户提供高效、可靠的分布式存储服务.     

GMAC: An overlay multicast network for mobile agent platforms

The lack of proper support for multicast services in the Internet has hindered the widespread use of applications that rely on group communication services such as mobile software agents. Although they do not require high bandwidth or heavy traffic, these types of applications need to cooperate in a scalable, fair and decentralized way. This paper presents GMAC, an overlay network that implements all multicast related functionality–including membership management and packet forwarding–in the end systems. GMAC introduces a new approach for providing multicast services for mobile agent platforms in a decentralized way, where group members cooperate in a fair way, minimize the protocol overhead, thus achieving great scalability. Simulations comparing GMAC with other approaches, in aspects such as end-to-end group propagation delay, group latency, group bandwidth, protocol overhead, resource utilization and failure recovery, show that GMAC is a scalable and robust solution to provide multicast services in a decentralized way to mobile software agent platforms with requirements similar to MoviLog.     

Designing storage management schemes for block-structured languages

Continuing the work presented in an earlier paper, we explain the design of the runtime storage management scheme for the Portable Programming Language (PPL). The design method uses three basic ideas-the use of reduced type-expressions, the classification of the components of an object according to the way their sizes vary, and the handling of stored objects as tree structures. It is illustrated by using it to derive a storage management scheme for the Portable Programming Language, and storage management schemes appropriate to Algol 68 and Ada that compare favourably with those already described in the literature.     

An overlay multicast protocol for live streaming and delay-guaranteed interactive media

In many collaborative multimedia applications, there is often a requirement for simultaneously supporting live streaming and shareable interaction. A major challenge in designing such an application by overlay multicast is how to simultaneously provide scalable live streaming and delay-guaranteed interactive media. Live streaming by overlay multicast incurs additional application-layer latency, which conflicts with the delay-sensitive property of interactive media. To handle this dilemma, in this paper, we propose a layered degree-constrained overlay multicast protocol, which organizes the overlay multicast tree as a layered degree-constrained core tree and an extended tree. The core tree maintains available resources in its top layers for subsequent two-way interaction, whereas the extended tree expands the core tree for one-way live streaming. Our simulation and experimental results show that the proposed overlay multicast protocol can simultaneously provide delay-guaranteed interactive media as well as scalable live streaming.     

Reliable overlay multicast trees for private Internet broadcasting with multiple sessions

With rapid advances of computing technologies and high speed networks, various high volume multimedia services have become popular in the Internet. Private Internet broadcasting is a typical way to support these services and overlay multicast technology is known to be a promising solution to support this method. In an overlay multicast network, members are dynamically joining or leaving their multicast group. To reduce frequent updates of multicast members and provide a reliable multicast route, overlay multicast trees are investigated. The problem is formulated as a binary integer programming which maximizes the minimum link reliability for all multicast sessions. Tabu search heuristic is developed with repeated intensification and diversification. Robust computational result is obtained that is comparable to the optimal solution and applicable in real time.     

Beyond the separation of identifier and locator: Building an identity-based overlay network architecture for the Future Internet

The Internet is continuously evolving from a static, host-based, uniquely attached node model to a mobile, host-free node model with the possibility of multiple attachment points to the network. However, the current Internet was not designed to support this type of workload because of its strict addressing mechanism. Thus, the Future Internet promotes the introduction of new architectures that provide the decoupling of identification and location. Moreover, new technologies, like cloud computing and Internet of Things, raise the necessity for a finer granularity of network nodes. Furthermore, the huge number of devices connected to the Internet and their finer granularity impose the necessity of flexible naming and, thus, integrated discovery mechanisms. In this paper we present an architecture that decouples the identification and location by using identities to identify the network nodes and moving from a host-to-host to a fine-grained process-to-process view of the network. Together with the mobility and multi-homing support, it also provides integrated discovery, flexible naming, and integrated security features. Finally, we analyze the architecture to discuss its performance and compare it with other (existing) approaches.     

Strategic behavior modeling of multi-service overlay multicast networks based on auction mechanism design

Since the users of overlay multicast networks belong to different administrative domains, they are selfish in nature; resulting in degradation of performance. That is why strategic behavior modeling is a hot topic in the area of the overlay multicast networks. Mechanism design is the most versatile tool for strategic behavior modeling in microeconomics. In this paper, we model the strategic behavior of the selfish peers by leveraging the rich theory of mechanism design using the concept of economic auctions. By considering the bandwidth of services as the commodity, we design a revenue-maximizing auction mechanism. The sellers are either the origin servers or the peers who forward the digital multimedia content to their downstream peers. For each seller, the corresponding downstream peers play the role of buyers who are referred to as bidders. Each bidder submits a sealed bid to the corresponding seller. The highest bidder wins and pays its bid for the service. Also, we derive analytical closed-form expressions for upper bounds relevant to the performance metrics. The experimental validation proves the scalability and the efficiency of the proposed mechanism.     

Non-cooperative optimization games in market-oriented overlay networks: an integrated model of resource pricing and network formation

In this paper, we formulate a non-cooperative optimization game in market-oriented overlay networks where participating peers share their own computing resources to earn virtual money called energy. We model an overlay network as a set of non-cooperative resource providing peers, called platforms, that perform resource pricing and topology management to maximize their own energy gains. Resource consuming peers, called agents, are simply designed to migrate platform-to-platform to find the least expensive resources in the network. Simulation results are presented to demonstrate the market dynamics as well as the global properties of the network, i.e., resource price and network topology, that emerge from local interactions among the group of peers.