Summary: AUGUST 6, 2001; TECH REPORT CNDS­2001­3 1
Global Flow Control for Wide Area Overlay
Networks: A Cost­Benefit Approach
Yair Amir, Baruch Awerbuch, Claudiu Danilov, Jonathan Stanton
Abstract---This paper presents a flow control protocol for
multi­sender multi­group 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 ben­
efit provided by the flow. In contrast to existing window­
based flow control schemes, we avoid end­to­end 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 re­
sulting protocol through simulations and validate the simu­
lations with live Internet experiments.
Keywords--- Flow Control, Overlay Networks, Cost­

Source: Amir, Yair - Department of Computer Science, Johns Hopkins University

Collections: Computer Technologies and Information Sciences