Generalised repair for overlay networks.pdfVIP

Generalised Repair for Overlay Networks Barry Porter, Franc?ois Ta??ani and Geoff Coulson Computing Department Lancaster University, Lancaster, UK {barry.porter, francois.taiani, geoff}@comp.lancs.ac.uk Abstract We present and evaluate a generic approach to the repair of overlay networks which identifies general principles of overlay repair and embodies these as a reusable service. At the heart of our approach is an algorithm that discovers the extent of a failed section of any type of overlay, and assigns responsibility to carry out the repair. The repair strategy itself is ‘pluggable’ and can be tailored to the requirements of a specific overlay type or instance. Our approach is ef- ficient in terms of the number of repair-related message ex- changes it incurs; scalable in that it involves only nodes in the locality of the failed section of the overlay; and resilient in that it correctly handles cases in which multiple adjacent nodes fail simultaneously, and it tolerates new failures that occur while a repair is underway. The benefits of our ap- proach are that: (i) it extracts and encapsulates best prac- tice in repair for overlays; (ii) it simplifies the design and implementation of new overlays (because repair issues can be treated orthogonally to basic functionality); and (iii) it supports tailorable levels of dependability for overlays, in- cluding pluggable repair strategies. 1. Introduction Overlay networks [12] are application-level distributed systems that are architecturally situated between the in- frastructure network (e.g. the IP layer) and the end-user ap- plication. They typically offer specialised virtual network topologies (e.g. trees or rings), or application-specific ser- vices which are outside the scope of the underlying network (e.g. application-level multicast or ad-hoc routing). Their use is increasingly common and the set of overlay types in use is becoming increasingly diverse [25, 6, 30, 9, 11]. Most overlay networks provide some mechani