A Novel Approach for Cooperative Overlay-Maintenance in Multi-overlay Environments

Overlay networks are widely adopted in many distributed systems for efficient resource sharing. Recently, issues in overlay network have also been introduced into cloud systems, in order to organize thousands of virtualized resources. In parallel, the explosion of P2P applications introduces the multi-overlay environment in which a number of nodes simultaneously participate in multiple overlays. When multiple applications running over a large set of nodes, some of nodes may take repeated efforts to preserve multi-overlay networks. Therefore, maintaining these co-existing overlays brings the redundant maintenance overhead. This paper presents a cooperative strategy to analyze the overlay maintenance of multi-overlay environments and to elaborate multiple overlays for simplifying the overlay maintenance. The proposed strategy exploits the synergy of co-existing overlays to handle their common overlay-maintenance, so that the redundant maintenance overhead could be eliminated while keeping performance. To evaluate the system performance, this paper not only analyzes several overlays but also considers realistic multi-overlay environments by varying the intersection ratio of diverse overlays and the combination of multiple overlays. Experimental results show that the proposed cooperative strategy significantly decreases the redundant overlay-maintenance overhead, where the reduction ratio of maintaining multiple overlays is higher than 60 percent in some of cases.