Srini Seetharaman, Georgia Tech

Preemptive Strategies to Improve Routing Performance of Native and Overlay Layers

Abstract

Overlay routing is known to cause undesired instability in a network by operating in a selfish manner. The objectives of overlay routing, such as optimizing end-to-end latency, are often in conflict with the objectives of traffic engineering in the native layer, which is concerned about balancing load. In our work, we build on past research that has investigated the recurring non-cooperative interaction between overlay routing and traffic engineering, and develop strategies that improve the routing performance of a particular layer with incomplete information about the other layer. In our strategies, one layer acts as a "leader" that predicts the "follower's" reaction and undertakes countermeasures to prevent future deterioration in performance. Specifically, we propose two classes of strategies -- "friendly" or "hostile" -- for each layer. By simulating under different network characteristics, we show that these preemptive strategies achieve near-optimal performance for the leader and increase the overall stability of the network. Furthermore, we observe that the best performance for a particular layer is achieved only when the goals of the other layer are completely violated, thereby motivating a higher level of selfishness.

Slides

Speaker Bio

Srinivasan Seetharaman is a fourth year PhD student in the Networking and Telecommunications group of Georgia Institute of Technology. He received his Masters degree in Computer Science from The Ohio State University. His current research interests include overlay networks, networking architectures and protocols. His thesis advisor is Prof. Mostafa Ammar.