Overlay networks have shown to be very effective towards the support and enhancement of network performance and the availability of new applications and protocols without interfering with the design of the underlying networks. One of the most challenging open issues in overlay networks, however, is paths overlapping, where overlay paths may share the same physical link and thus, the ability of overlay networks to quickly recover from congestion and path failures is severely affected. This chapter undertakes a review of some graph theoretic based methods for the selection of a set of topologically diverse routers towards the provision of independent paths for better availability, performance and reliability in overlay networks. Moreover, it proposes a graph decomposition-based approach for the maximization of path diversity without degrading network performance of in terms of latency. Some remarks on future developments and challenges in the field of overlay networks are included.
Editor(s): Kouvatsos, DD Source: NETWORK PERFORMANCE ENGINEERING: A HANDBOOK ON CONVERGENT MULTI-SERVICE NETWORKS AND NEXT GENERATION INTERNET