Tag Archives: overlay routing

Designing an Incentive-Based Framework for Overlay Routing (Technical Report 2007)

Lee, G. M., Choi, T., and Zhang, Y. (2007). Designing an Incentive-Based Framework for Overlay Routing. UTCS Technical Report, January 2007.

Overlay routing becomes popular as an incremental mechanism to improve internet routing. So far, overlay nodes are always assumed to cooperate with each other. In this paper, we analyze overlay routing in a new viewpoint, in which the overlay nodes act independently to maximize their own payoff. We use a game-theoretic approach to analyze the transit traffic forwarding and realize that overlay nodes are not likely to cooperate with each other in our new scenario.

In order to stimulate the independent overlay nodes to cooperate with each other, we design and propose an incentive-based framework. We introduce three possible systems and evaluate them analytically. Among the candidates, we use simulation to verify the feasibility of our proposed framework generalized punish-and-reward system. The performance gets closer to social optimum as we increase the number of punishments. In addition, the system shows tolerance against impatient players.

On the Interactions of Overlay Routing (Master’s Thesis 2006)

Gene Moo Lee (2006). On the Interactions of Overlay Routing. Master’s Thesis, University of Texas at Austin, May 2006. [UT Library]

Overlay routing has been successful as an incremental method to improve the current Internet routing by allowing users to select the Internet paths by themselves. By its nature, overlay routing has selfish behavior, which makes an impact on the related components of Internet routing. In this thesis, we study three interactions related to overlay routing. First, overlay routing changes the traffic patterns observed by the network operating side, which uses traffic engineering techniques to cope with the dynamic traffic demands. We improve this vertical interaction between overlay routing and traffic engineering. Secondly, the performance of overlay routing may be affected by the action of other coexisting overlays. An initial result on the horizontal interaction among multiple overlays is given. Lastly, within a single overlay network, overlay nodes can be regarded as independent decision-makers, who act strategically to maximize individual gain. We design an incentive-based framework to achieve Pareto-optimality in the internal interaction of overlay routing.