A Scalable Middleware for Creating and Managing Autonomous Overlays

Many distributed applications build overlays on top of the Internet. Several unsolved issues at the network layer can explain this trend to implement network services such as multicast, mobility and security at the application layer. On one hand, overlays creating basic topologies are usually limited in flexibility and scalability. On the other hand, overlays creating complex topologies require some form of application level addressing, routing and naming mechanisms. Our aim is to design an efficient and robust addressing, routing and naming middleware for building and managing these complex overlays. Our only assumption is that they are deployed over the Internet topology. Applications that use our middleware will be relieved from managing their own overlay topologies. Our middleware architecture is based on the separation of the naming and the addressing planes and provides a convergence plane for the current heterogeneous Internet environment. To implement this property, we have designed a scalable distributed kappa-resilient name to address binding system. This paper describes the design of our middleware and presents some performance results concerning its routing scalability, its path inflation efficiency and its resilience to network dynamics.