Customizable Services for Application-layer Overlay Networks

• Main Author: Zhao, Yu
• Other Authors: Liebeherr, Jorg
• Language: en_ca
• Published: 2013
• Subjects: software; engineering; networking; 0984
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/1807/35707

Application-layer overlay networks have emerged as a powerful paradigm for providing network services. While most approaches focus on providing a pre-defined set of network services, we provide a mechanism for network applications to deploy customizable data delivery services. We present the design, implementation, and evaluation of application-defined data delivery services that are executed at overlay nodes by transmitting messages marked with service identifiers. In our approach, a data delivery services is specified as an XML specification that define a finite-state machines that respond to network events, and perform a set of network primitives. We implemented a mechanism to execute these XML specifications in the HyperCast overlay middleware, and have evaluated this mechanism quantitatively on an Emulab testbed. The experiments show that our approach is effective in realizing a variety of data delivery services without incurring unreasonable performance overhead.