International Journal of Computer Trends and Technology- volume3Issue1- 2012

A Study of Selfish Overlay Networks

Venkata Rao Gangineni1, Bala Krishna2
1

Pursuing M.Tech(CSE), Nalanda Institute of Engineering & Technology, Siddharth Nagar, Sattenapalli, Guntur Affiliated to JNTUK, Kakinada, A.P., India.
2

Asst. Professor, Department of Computer Science Engineering, Nalanda Institute of Engineering & Technology,Siddharth Nagar, Sattenapalli, Guntur Affiliated to JNTUK, Kakinada, A.P., India.

Abstract Overlay networks have been used for adding and enhancing functionality to the end-users without requiring modifications in the Internet core mechanisms. Overlay networks have been used for a variety of popular applications including routing, file sharing, content distribution, and server deployment. Overlay network provides effective and reliable services by creating a virtual topology on top of existing networks. However, new network environments and network services require new management strategies which can cope with resource constraints, scalability, dependability, context awareness, security, mobility, and other issues. This paper presents an overview of overlay networks and it also considers the scenario when multiple overlays are constructed on top of a common physical network. These overlays have partially overlapping paths and even nodes. Each overlay is selfish by nature in that it performs overlay routing so as to optimize its own performance without considering the impact on other overlays.

abstraction that provides load balancing, query forwarding and bounded lookup times [2]. In an overlay topology, node behavior can be either cooperative or selfish. In the cooperative mode of operation, each node creates overlay links to send its traffic demands to allow other nodes to route their traffic demands over them. In the selfish mode of operation, nodes create overlay links in the network to maximize their own benefits. Thus, an overlay network has the following properties: To be built on top of one or more existing networks. To add an additional layer of indirection/virtualization. To change properties in one or more areas of underlying networks. To be possible to change an existing network layer.

Keywords Overlay network, selfish nodes, overlay routing.

I. INTRODUCTION Overlay networks are computer networks that are built on top of physical networks of interconnected routers and end-systems. A number of application layer overlay designs have been proposed to address issues like ensuring performance and availability of Internet routing, enabling multicasting, providing Quality of Service (QoS) guarantees, protecting from denial of service attacks, and content distribution and file sharing services [1]. It is well known that flooding-based systems do not scale well due to the bandwidth and processing requirements they impose on the network. In addition, they provide no guarantees as to lookup times or content accessibility. Overlay networks can help in addressing these issues because they have a network semantics layer above the basic transport protocol level (Fig. 1). This organizes the network topology according the nodes content, implementing a distributed hash table

Fig 1. An example of an overlay network Large scale distributed applications can take advantages of promising characteristics of overlay networks, such as resilience in the event of node failures, adaptation of extended structures and applications and ease of deployment in setting up overlay networks and services. Although the concept of overlay networks has received much attention lately, there has been little focus on the

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interaction of co-existence of overlay networks. In this work, we consider the scenario when multiple overlays are constructed on top of a common physical network. These overlays have partially overlapping paths and even nodes. Each overlay is selfish by nature in that it performs overlay routing so as to optimize its own performance without considering the impact on other overlays. We explore this form of interaction and how the interaction can affect the network stability, performance and fairness in resource allocation. II. TYPICAL OVERLAY NETWORKS Peer-to-peer (P2P) networks and Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) are two typical overlay networks in constructing large scale distributed applications over large networks. Peer-to-peer networks run on top of the Internet. Peer-to-peer networks are distributed systems where the software running on each node provides equivalent functions. A definition of P2P networking is a set of technologies that enable the direct exchange of services or data between computers. Implicit in this definition are the fundamental principles that peers are equals. P2P systems emphasize sharing among these equals. A pure peer-to-peer system runs without any centralized control or hierarchical organization. A hybrid system uses some centralized or hierarchical resources. Peers can represent clients, servers, routers, or even networks [3]. A. Peer- to- peer Network In an opposite approach from the client/server model, it is expected for all clients in Peer-to-peer networks to provide resources, including bandwidth, storage space, and computing power. Thus, as nodes arrive and make new requests, the total capacity of the system also increases. This is not different from the client-server architecture, where a fixed set of servers involves that adding more clients generally means that they perceive a decrease in the global performance. The distributed nature of P2P networks also increases robustness in case of failures by replicating data over multiple peers. In addition, in pure peer-to-peer systems, peers can find data without relying on a centralized index server. In the latter case, there is no single point of failure in the system. Management of P2P Network: For peer-to-peer networks, the management considers three different issues: traffic management, scalability management and security management. Critical applications must not be affected by non-priority applications. Because of this, approaches like providing flexible bandwidth limits, bandwidth borrowing, and traffic queuing should be considered. Peer-to-peer systems have to provide services like routing, searching for and accessing of resources. An open question is how much can self-organization emerge as an essential feature for improving the quality of the services. Requirements for self-organization in peer-to-peer networks [4] include issues like feedback, reduction of complexity, randomness, self-organized criticality and emergence. There are important issues related to security in overlay networks, like file sharing where extensive security requirements must be satisfied (e.g., enterprise content sharing and distributed computing) [5]. Likewise, many peer-to-peer networks are under constant attacks such as: Different types of attacks like denial of service attacks (attacks that may make the network run very slowly or break completely), spamming (sending unsolicited information across the network) or identity attacks (tracking down the users of the network). Most attacks can be controlled from design and through the use of encryption. The Byzantine Generals Problem . B. Virtual Private Network A Virtual Private Network (VPN) is a computer network in which some of the links between nodes are carried by open connections or virtual circuits over shared or public communication networks (e.g., the Internet) as opposed to their conduction across a single private network. The link-layer protocols of the virtual network are said to be tunneled through the larger network. One common application is secure communications through the Internet. Although a VPN does not need to have explicit security features, such as authentication or content encryption, they can be used to separate the traffic of different user communities over an underlying network with strong security features [6]. Management of Virtual Private Network: Management of VPNs faces some challenges in security management, service management, data management and even tunnel management [10], [11] to maintain fast, secure and reliable communications. These challenges include: Security Management: VPNs remain susceptible to security issues when they try to connect between two private networks using a public resource. The challenge in making a practical VPN, therefore, is finding the best security for it. Service Management: VPN management simplifies the task of defining, distributing, enforcing and deploying VPN policies to keep all remote sites synchronized with the latest security policies.

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Data Management: VPN management supports access to back-end databases for highly efficient and reliable data storage and retrieval. Tunnel Management: It can be thought in terms of what type of tunneling protocols will be used. III. MULTICASTING IN OVERLAY NETWORK Many applications (e.g., audio and video streaming, multi-party games) rely on some support for data multicast, where clients interested in a given data stream can join a corresponding multicast group. Although IP multicast approaches can be considered to be solutions for various new emerging services which require active participation from many users, they do not work well in the current Internet which is based on unicast communications [7]. Various alternative methods are being developed to overcome this limitation of the current Internet. One such method is overlay multicast. These networks are typically composed of one or more propagation trees or a single mesh. In these structures, nodes are computers and edges are overlay links formed by the establishment of peering relationships between the nodes. Overlay multicast networks can be characterized by a set of measures and properties, an important element of which is the diffusion pattern. Peer selection in these systems is based on classic measures like end-to-end delay and outgoing bandwidth. In mesh-based systems, where nodes pull the data from their neighbors, peer selection is primarily based on the availability of content on nodes. Most overlay multicast uses bi-directional TCP connections between the end-systems. Although TCP guarantees an abutted sequence for reception and reliable transmission, TCP does not satisfy all properties of the overlay multicast. This is why there are some research work around the overlay multicast topic. In [8], authors propose to combine two mechanisms by deploying a protocol stack and design a two-layered architecture for media streaming in overlay networks. The first layer is a generic and customizable protocol which is able to construct and maintain different types of meshes. The second layer is responsible for data propagation to the nodes in the mesh by constructing an optimized diffusion tree. The goal of this modular approach is to address some inherent problems in tree-based overlay streaming solutions, in particular the vulnerability of the diffusion tree against failures and its poor resource utilization. This architecture is lightweight in terms of bandwidth usage and maintains an acceptable average reception rate. There are many works related to the construction of multicast algorithms in overlay networks [9], [10], although neither of these algorithms have addressed QoS requirements of multicast groups. Overlay multicast network infrastructures have been proposed as feasible solutions to support scalable inter-domain multicast services for real-time applications [11], (utilization of MSNs: multicast service nodes). QUEST (a QoS assured composEable Service infrastructure) provide both QoS assurances under multiple QoS constraints, and load balancing in service overlay networks [12]. IV. OVERLAY INTERACTION In this section, we consider the scenario when multiple overlays are constructed on top of a common physical network. These overlays have partially overlapping paths and even nodes. Each overlay is selfish by nature in that it performs overlay routing so as to optimize its own performance without considering the impact on other overlays. In this section, we discuss some intrinsic problems of overlays interaction. These problems include sub-optimality in performance and certain fairness anomaly in resource allocation. It is important to point out that these problems are not unique to overlay optimal routing policy, but rather, common to all forms of application layer routing that have interaction among overlays. Worse yet, because overlay may not realize the existence of other overlays, these problems will persist due to the convergence to the equilibrium point. Let us use an example to illustrate these issues. A physical network consisting of six nodes is depicted in Figure 2.

Fig 2. A simple network with two overlays

There are two overlays in the network: overlay 1 consists of node A,C,E while overlay 2 consists of node B,D, F. For overlay 1, all logical links map to the corresponding physical links except for the logical link between node C and node E, which corresponds to the physical links C D E. For overlay 2, all logical links map to the corresponding physical links except for the logical link between node B and node D, which corresponds to the

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physical links B C D. Thus, the physical link C D is the common link which is shared by these two overlays. The important properties of overlay optimization are: Sub-optimality: The equilibrium point is not Patero (or social) optimal, which can cause tragedy of the commons, meaning that the performance of all overlays can be seriously degraded, despite their individual routing optimization. Fairness paradox: Another more interesting and important result is on the issue of fairness in resource allocation. Namely, at the equilibrium, it is possible for some overlays to obtain a higher percentage of the common resource (e.g., link bandwidth) as compared to other overlays and cause these overlays to experience a significant performance degradation.
[5] L. Paschoal Gaspary, M.P. Barcellos, A. Detsch and R.S. Antunes, (2007). Flexible security in peer-to-peer applications: Enabling new opportunities beyond file sharing. Computer Networks, Vol. 51, Issue 17, pp4797-4815. [6] RFC 2764, (2000). A Framework for IP Based Virtual Private Networks, http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2764.txt. [7] S.E. Deering, (1988). Multicast routing in internetworks and extended LANs. Symposium proceedings on Communications architectures and protocols, pp55-64, August 1988, Stanford, California, USA. [8] A. Malekpour, F. Pedone, M. Allani and B. Garbinato, (2009). Streamline: An Architecture for Overlay Multicast. Eight IEEE International Symposium on Network Computing and Applications, pp4451, August 2009, Los Alamitos, CA, USA. [9] M. Castro, P. Druschel, A.M. Kermarrec, A. Nandi, A. Rowstron and A. Singh, (2003). Splitstream: high-bandwidth multicast in cooperative environments. . In Proceedings of ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles (SOSP), pp298-313, October 2003, Bolton Landing, NY, USA. [10] M. Castro, P. Druschel, A.-M. Kermarrec and A. Rowstron, (2002). Scribe: a large-scale and decentralized application-level multicast infrastructure. IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communication (JSAC), Vol. 20, Issue 8, pp1489-1499. [11] S.Y. Shi and J.S. Turner, (2002). Routing in Overlay Multicast Networks. In Proceedings of the IEEE INFOCOM 2002, Vol. 3, pp12001208, June 2002, New York, NY, USA. [12] X. Gu, K. Nahrstedt, R. Chang and C. Ward, (2003). QoS-assured service composition in managed service overlay networks. In Proceedings IEEE International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems (ICDCS), pp194-201, May 2003, Providence, Rhode Island, USA.

V. CONCLUSION Overlay networks are used for a variety of popular applications including routing , content distribution , peerto-peer (P2P) file sharing and streaming, data-center applications , and online multi-player games. Overlay network provides effective and reliable services by creating a virtual topology on top of existing networks. However, new network environments and network services require new management strategies which can cope with resource constraints, scalability, dependability, context awareness, security, mobility, and other issues. This paper presents an overview of overlay networks and it also considers the scenario when multiple overlays are constructed on top of a common physical network. These overlays have partially overlapping paths and even nodes. Each overlay is selfish by nature in that it performs overlay routing so as to optimize its own performance without considering the impact on other overlays.

AUTHORS PROFILE

Venkata Rao Gangineni, pursuing M.Tech(CSE) from Nalanda Institute of Engineering & Technology, Siddharth Nagar, Sattenapalli, Guntur Affiliated to JNTUK, Kakinada, A.P., India. My research Interests are Computer Networks.

REFERENCES
[1] N.M. Mosharaf Kabir Chowdhury and R. Boutaba, (2009). Network Virtualization: State of the Art and Research Challenges. IEEE Communications Magazine, Vol. 47, Issue 7, pp20-26. [2] D. Doval and D. OMahony, (2003). Overlay Networks: A Scalable Alternative for P2P. IEEE Internet Computing, Vol. 7, No. 4, pp79-82. [3] M. Hofmann and L.R. Beaumont, (2005). Content networking: architecture, protocols, and practice. Morgan Kaufmann, ISBN: 1558608346. [4] H. De Meer and C. Koppen, (2005). Self-Organization in Peer-toPeer Systems. R. Steinmetz and K. Wehrle (Eds.): P2P Systems and Applications, LNCS 3485, pp247-266.

Bala Krishna, working as Asst. Professor, Department of Computer Science Engineering at Nalanda Institute of Engineering & Technology, Siddharth Nagar, Sattenapalli, Guntur Affiliated to JNTUK, Kakinada, A.P., India. My research Interests are Data Mining and Computer Networks.

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