The impact of topology on overlay routing service

A moderate amount of recent work has been dedicated to using overlay network to support value-added network service, such as overlay multicast, OverQoS, etc. Overlay service network is a generic service framework which is designed to provide a variety of services to overlay service customers. To design an overlay service network, the first step is to choose an overlay topology connecting all the overlay service nodes. For example, RON [Anderson, DG et al., 2001] has used full mesh topology connecting all the nodes. In this paper, we did a study on the impact of topology on the overlay routing service. We found that the overlay topology has significant impact on the overlay routing in terms of routing performance and routing overhead. For example, the full mesh topology does not always give us the best performance. Moreover, the physical topology information can benefit us a lot to construct an efficient overlay topology. In addition, some alternative topologies can provide us with better performance when considering both the routing performance and overhead.