Global Flow Control for Wide Area Overlay Networks: A Cost-Benefit Approach

Info, ps, ps.gz, pdf. Technical Report CNDS-2001-3. Citation Yair Amir, Baruch Awerbuch, Claudiu Danilov, Jonathan Stanton, "Global Flow Control for Wide Area Overlay Networks: A Cost-Benefit Approach", Proceedings of the Fifth IEEE Conference on Open Architectures and Network Programming, New York, New York, June 28-29, 2002. A longer version is available as a Johns Hopkins University, Center for Networking and Distributed Systems Technical Report CNDS-2001-3, 2001. Authors Yair Amir, Baruch Awerbuch, Claudiu Danilov, Jonathan Stanton, Abstract This paper presents a flow control protocol for multi-sender multi-group multicast and unicast in wide area overlay networks. The protocol is analytically grounded and achieves real world goals, such as simplicity, fairness and minimal resource usage. Flows are regulated based on the ``opportunity'' costs of network resources used and the benefit provided by the flow. In contrast to existing window-based flow control schemes, we avoid end-to-end per sender or per group feedback by looking only at the state of the virtual links between participating nodes. This produces control traffic proportional only to the number of overlay network links and independent of the number of groups, senders or receivers. We show the effectiveness of the resulting protocol through simulations and validate the simulations with live Internet experiments.