On improving dynamic stochastic routing algorithms in overlay networks

Internet applications are commonly designed and deployed as overlays. Recent studies have shown that overlay nodes may achieve performance gains through intermediate nodes instead of using the default direct Internet path. In this paper, we study a stochastic routing algorithm to determine the detours or relay paths between a pair of end-to-end nodes for performance enhancement by taking the stochastic properties of the overlay links. The mail idea and the algorithm features are first illustrated; then, we proposed various algorithm improvements by leveraging the actual delay and the expected delay along the path using a stochastic optimization framework. We conducted a simulation study for comparing the proposed stochastic routing algorithm and the conventional routing algorithms. The simulation results show that the proposed stochastic routing algorithm outperforms other algorithms in various network scenarios in reducing packet loss and average delay. With minor variations, the algorithm may be applied for P2P networks and delay-tolerant networks.