A self-managed resilient overlay network for interactive multimedia communications

The use of interactive multimedia communications is widespread in business and education, providing an enriched user experience in teleconferencing, distance learning and online meetings. Overlays networks are the underlying mechanisms enabling multipoint communication in interactive multimedia platforms. They must cope with constraints on heterogeneity, scalability and availability of communications, making their deployment and management a true challenge. Thus, several issues might affect the resilience of overlay networks, threatening ongoing communications. Overlay networks usually use self-organization and self-stabilization techniques to achieve resilient communications. Techniques implementing other self-management properties such as self-regulation also help in improving the resilience of the overlay. In this paper, the resilience of a reflector-based overlay network is improved with a self-regulation technique based on media transcoding. This balances the workloads of the reflectors of the overlay avoiding excessive usage of network links. As a result, the overlay is more resilient to failures. Extensive simulations have been carried out, and various media transcoding schemes have been compared, proving that self-regulation techniques improve the resilience of the reflector-based overlay network.