Resilient Overlay Networks

This paper presents an overlay network that is designed for the purpose of detecting faults in the network, including outages connections and nodes. Overlay networks introduces an application layer overlay on top of the current network. This allows for control over the forwarding and routing between the specific nodes that have this application layer overlay network. The authors use this idea to create a fault detection and correction network named Resilient Overlay Networks.

Each RON node detects problems by aggressively probing and monitoring the paths connecting the nodes. RON nodes and forward and route to other RON nodes depending on the route condition. RON networks listed 3 design goals. First, it wanted fast failure detection and recovery. This meant they needed to be constantly monitoring the links. Second, they wanted a tighter Integration with the application, which allow the applications themselves to specify at what level the fault tolerant should be. Third, they wanted a more expressive policy routing, which is allowed at the application layer by changing the routing in between the RON nodes. Several interesting research questions arose, including the performance metric in which they select the routes and paths, and how they categorize the routes as "good."

The results of the evaluation came out to be pretty good, as it only took on average 18 seconds to detect and recover from a fault, which is better than BGP-4. This paper offers a very interesting overlay network, and it even categorizes the latencies of each path. It seems like this would be a great way to test out different network service and protocols.