A programming environment for on-demand service overlays

Abstract

Recent years have seen a growing interest in overlay networks. Overlay networks simplify the complications of creating and connecting distributed applications on the network by optimizing the underlying IP routing architecture. This thesis presents a programming environment (PEON) for automatically generating, monitoring and adapting an overlay network in response to application requirements and changing network conditions. The system automatically generates and maintains an overlay of routing modules to satisfy the application requirements. The runtime environment employs various constraint-satisfaction-programming (CSP) heuristics to allocate resources between competing applications with varying requirements of bandwidth, latency, and packet loss. The system additionally offers a "Reflection API" that allows an application to monitor and adapt the internal structure of its overlay to fine-tune its parameters.