A distributed and conflict-aware measurement method based on local information exchange in overlay networks

Network resource information, including available bandwidth, propagation delay and packet loss ratio, should be obtained by measurements for maintaining the effectiveness of overlay network services. However, measurements consume bandwidth that should be used for transferring data. Furthermore, although measurement accuracy can be enhanced by frequent measurements, measuring with high frequency can cause a measurement conflict problem that increases the network load and degrades the measurement accuracy. In this paper, we propose a distributed, conflict-aware measurement method that reduces the measurement conflicts while maintaining high measurement accuracy. The main idea is that overlay nodes exchange the route information and the measurement results with a small number of other overlay nodes while decreasing the measurement frequency. Simulation results show that the relative error in the measurement results can be halved with proposed method, while keeping the total measurement overhead unchanged, compared with the existing method. We also confirm that exchanging measurement results contributes more to the enhancement of measurement accuracy than performing measurements.