Design and Performance Evaluation of Service Overlay Networks Topologies

Nowadays, Internet still lacks of adequate support for QoS-sensitive applications, such as VoIP, Videoconference, and Video-on-Demand. In a large extent, this is due to the fact that Internet was originally designed to provide only a best-effort packet delivery service. In recent years, Service Overlay Networks (SONs) have emerged as a profitable way to leverage these issues without changing the underlying infrastructure. In this paper, we address the topology design problem of a SON from a performance point of view. Since the analytical solution of the problem is too computationally complex, we compare the performance of some well-known topologies and we also propose a new traffic demand aware overlay topology. Through extensive simulations, we investigate the performance of each overlay topology in different network scenarios, taking into account overhead and accepted traffic between the overlay nodes.