Policy-Aware Virtual relay placement for inter-domain path diversity

Exploiting path diversity to enhance communication reliability is a key desired property in Internet. While the existing routing architecture is reluctant to adopt changes, overlay routing has been proposed to circumvent the constraints of native routing by employing intermediary relays. However, the selfish inter-domain relay placement may violate local routing policies at intermediary relays and thus affect their economic costs and performances. With the recent advance of the concept of network virtualization, it is envisioned that virtual networks should be provisioned in cooperation with infrastructure providers in a holistic view without compromising their profits. In this paper, the problem of policy-aware virtual relay placement is first studied to investigate the feasibility of provisioning policy-compliant multipath routing via virtual relays for inter-domain communication reliability. By evaluation on a real domain-level Internet topology, it is demonstrated that policy-compliant virtual relaying can achieve a similar protection gain against single link failures compared to its selfish counterpart. It is also shown that the presented heuristic placement strategies perform well to approach the optimal solution.