An efficient and scalable engine for large scale multimedia overlay networks

When dealing with multimedia delivery, scalability, efficiency and Quality of Service (QoS) are challenging features for today's networks. Overlay networks can compensate for the lack of control over the network routers, but for real-world applications overlay network performance is an issue. This paper presents an efficient solution for software implementation of overlay network nodes. A new, advanced Distributed Linked Data Structures (DLDS) schema has been developed to provide scalable per-flow resource reservation and fast, searchless routing/forwarding table lookup. This schema has been integrated in a new overlay network framework that features hierarchical dynamic routing and QoS estimation based on performance measures of the underlying network. The proposed technique has been implemented and tested in a large, realistic network simulation environment, and experimental results are presented.