Application layer addressing, routing and naming framework for overlays

Abstract

A growing number of applications create overlays on top of the Internet. Several unsolved issues at the network layer can explain this trend to implement network services such as multicast, mobility and security at the application layer. However overlays require some form of internal addressing, routing and naming. Therefore their topologies are usually kept simple but this limits their flexibility and scalability. Our aim is to design an efficient and robust addressing, routing and naming framework for complex overlays. Our only assumption is that they are constrained by the Internet topology. Applications using our framework will be relieved from managing their own overlay topologies. This paper presents our framework in detail as well as some performance results concerning its routing efficiency, its reliability to network dynamics and its naming scalability.