11/10/2023
Overlays
Dr. T. Venkatesh
Requirements for Today’s Internet
• Quality-of-service (QoS) for applications
– fast response time, adequate quality for VoIP, IPTV, etc.
• Scalability
– millions or more of users, devices, …
• Mobility
– untethered access, mobile users, devices, …
• Security (and Privacy)
– protect against malicious attacks, accountability of user actions
• Manageability
– configure, operate and manage networks
– trouble-shooting network problems
• Flexibility, Extensibility
– ease of new service creation and deployment?
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11/10/2023
Overlay Networks
• A “logical” network built on top of a physical network
– Overlay links are tunnels through the underlying
network
• Many logical networks may coexist at once
– Over the same underlying network
– And providing its own particular service
• Nodes are often end hosts
– Acting as intermediate nodes that forward traffic
– Providing a service, such as access to files
• Who controls the nodes providing service?
– The party providing the service (e.g., Akamai)
– Distributed collection of end users (e.g., peer-to-peer)
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Overlay and IP/Internet
• IP Network/Internet started as an Overlay
– over various physical networks, in particular telephone
networks
– There are now many “overlays” over today’s Internet
physical infrastructure
• Use tool for incremental enhancements to IP
– IPv6
– Security, e.g., VPNs
– Mobility
– Multicast
• 2.5G/3G Cellular Data Network as an Overlay
• CDNs and P2P Networks, …
• Question: where a function belongs?
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11/10/2023
IP Tunneling to Build Overlay Links
• IP tunnel is a virtual point-to-point link
– Illusion of direct link between two separated nodes
A B E F
Logical view: tunnel
A B E F
Physical view:
• Encapsulation of packet inside an IP datagram
– Node B sends a packet to node E
– … containing another packet as the payload
IP Multicast & MBone
• Multicast
– Delivering the same data to many receivers
– Avoiding sending the same data many times
unicast multicast
• IP multicast
– Special addressing, forwarding, and routing schemes
– Not widely deployed, so MBone tunneled between nodes
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11/10/2023
IP Multicast
CMU Stanford
UMN
Berkeley
Routers with multicast support
•No duplicate packets
•Highly efficient bandwidth usage
Key Architectural Decision: Add support for multicast in IP layer
Key Concerns with IP Multicast
• Scalability with number of groups
– Routers maintain per-group state
– Aggregation of multicast addresses is complicated
• Supporting higher level functionality is difficult
– IP Multicast: best-effort multi-point delivery service
– Reliability and congestion control for IP Multicast
complicated
• Deployment is difficult and slow
– ISPs reluctant to turn on IP Multicast
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11/10/2023
Application-level Overlays
Site 2 Site 3 N
N ISP1 ISP2 N
Site 1
N ISP3 N
• One per application
• Nodes are decentralized N Site 4
• Network operations/management
may be centralized
RON: Resilient Overlay Networks
Premise: by building application overlay network,
can increase performance and reliability of routing
Princeton Yale
application-layer
router Two-hop (application-level)
Berkeley-to-Princeton route
Berkeley
[Link]
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11/10/2023
RON Circumvents Policy Restrictions
• IP routing depends on AS routing policies
– But hosts may pick paths that circumvent policies
USLEC ISP
me PU Patriot
My home
computer
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RON Adapts to Network Conditions
B
• Start experiencing bad performance
– Then, start forwarding through intermediate host
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RON Customizes to Applications
B
A bulk transfer
• VoIP traffic: low-latency path
• Bulk transfer: high-bandwidth path
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How Does RON Work?
• Keeping it small to avoid scaling problems
– A few friends who want better service
– Just for their communication with each other
– E.g., VoIP, gaming, collaborative work, etc.
• Send probes between each pair of hosts
B
A
C
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11/10/2023
How Does RON Work?
• Exchange the results of the probes
– Each host shares results with every other host
– Essentially running a link-state protocol!
– So, every host knows the performance properties
• Forward via intermediate host when needed
B
B
A
C
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RON Works in Practice
• Faster reaction to failure
– RON reacts in a few seconds
– BGP sometimes takes a few minutes
• Single-hop indirect routing
– No need to go through many intermediate hosts
– One extra hop circumvents the problems
• Better end-to-end paths
– Circumventing routing policy restrictions
– Sometimes the RON paths are actually shorter
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RON Limited to Small Deployments
• Extra latency through intermediate hops
– Software and propagation delays for forwarding
• Overhead on the intermediate node
– Imposing CPU and I/O load on the host
• Overhead for probing the virtual links
– Bandwidth consumed by frequent probes
– Trade-off between probe overhead & detection speed
• Possibility of causing instability
– Moving traffic in response to poor performance
– May lead to congestion on the new paths
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