An Overlay Application-Layer Multicast Infrastructure

Overlay networks are considered an easy and effective way to deploy value-added Internet services by extending the best-effort delivery service supported by IP layer. However, a careful design is needed in order to take advantage of these benefits. Since there are no standards for overlay networks yet, they are often independently designed, which means that each one applies its own topology discovery and takes its own routing decisions. As a result, they may negatively affect each other by generating control overhead and by creating bottlenecks in the physical network. In order to avoid such a situation, this work proposes an overlay network organization and architecture towards a middleware for overlay multicast services. As proof of concept, we have deployed a multicast service overlay network taking advantage of this architecture and considering both intradomain and interdomain scenarios – the latter being practically impossible to deploy on public networks due to administrative issues. By experimental measurements, we validate interdomain multicast functionality over four autonomous systems without any native support from underlying networks.