Overlay routing has been proposed to enhance the reliability and performance of IP networks, since it can bypass congestion and transient outages by forwarding traffic through one or more intermediate overlay nodes. In this paper, two algorithms for multicast applications in service overlay networks are presented. The first is tailored for source specific applications and builds virtual source rooted multicast trees to allow one node in the multicast group to send data to the other member nodes. The second is tailored for group shared applications and constructs a virtual shared tree among group members. Their objective is to achieve traffic balancing on the overlay network so as to avoid traffic congestion and fluctuation, which cause low network performance. To address these problems, the algorithms actively probe the underlay network and compute virtual multicast trees by dynamically selecting the least loaded available paths on the overlay network. The low-complexity algorithms are...
Dario Pompili, Caterina M. Scoglio, Luca Lopez