iOverlay: A Lightweight Middleware Infrastructure for Overlay Application Implementations

Abstract

Abstract. The very nature of implementing and evaluating fully distributed algorithms or protocols in application-layer overlay networks involves certain programming tasks that are at best mundane and tedious -and at worst challenging -even at the application level. In this paper, we present iOverlay, a lightweight and high-performance middleware infrastructure that addresses these problems in a novel way by providing clean, well-documented layers of middleware components. The internals of iOverlay are carefully designed and implemented to maximize its performance, without sacrificing the simplicity of application implementations using iOverlay. We illustrate the effectiveness of iOverlay by rapidly implementing a set of overlay applications, and report our findings and experiences by deploying them on PlanetLab, the wide-area overlay network testbed that iOverlay conveniently supports.

Multi-level reconfigurable self-organization in overlay services

“…Moving some of this complexity in a middleware architecture is required. This is an issue discussed in literature [Braynard et al, 2002, Grace et al, 2004, Joita et al, 2005, Joseph et al, 2006, Li et al, 2004, Mao et al, 2008, Rodriguez et al, 2004. ASMA is a conceptual selforganization architecture that is able to incorporate some of this complexity and more specifically, the continuous and reconfigurable discovery, structuring and coordination of system entities.…”

“…Introducing a higher abstraction and modularity is a promising approach to meet this challenge as Grace et al [2008], Joseph et al [2006], Mao et al [2008], Li et al [2004], Rodriguez et al [2004], Braynard et al [2002] and Joita et al [2005] identify. Abstraction concerns a hierarchical representation or generalization of system functionality.…”

“…iOverlay [Li et al, 2004] provides an interface for building overlay networks and their applications. This interface is rather limited as it only supports overlay communication leaving excessive freedom to the developer.…”

Overlay Networks – Implementation by Specification

“…Macedon [9] and iOverlay [10] are under development and evaluation in the corresponding projects. Other frameworks, like SEDA [7] or JXTA (http://www.jxta.org), have also been used for overlay implementations, although they do not provide any higher-level support for topologies and other overlay specific tasks.…”

Exploiting Synergies between Coexisting Overlays

“…Over the past decade, overlay networks have emerged as a popular paradigm to offer more tailored services to specific classes of application such as multicasting, inter-domain routing, distributed file sharing and storage, and multimedia streaming [21,9,5,6].…”