An efficient and scalable engine for large scale multimedia overlay networks

When dealing with multimedia delivery, scalability, efficiency and Quality of Service (QoS) are challenging features for today´s networks. Overlay networks can compensate for the lack of control over the network routers, but for real-world applications overlay network performance is an issue. This paper presents an efficient solution for software implementation of overlay network nodes. A new, advanced Distributed Linked Data Structures (DLDS) schema has been developed to provide scalable per-flow resource reservation and fast, searchless routing/forwarding table lookup. This schema has been integrated in a new overlay network framework that features hierarchical dynamic routing and QoS estimation based on performance measures of the underlying network. The proposed technique has been implemented and tested in a large, realistic network simulation environment, and experimental results are presented.