Setup and maintenance of Overlay Networks for multimedia services in mobile environments

Abstract

A Service-specific Overlay Network (SSON) is a virtualization concept proposed for customized media delivery in the Ambient Networks architecture [1]. The service specific media delivery network has to be constructed dynamically without prior knowledge of the underlying physical network. This process must consider unique properties, such as routing the media flow through strategic locations that provide special media processing capabilities (for example, media transcoding, caching and synchronization) inside the network. In today's dynamic and mobile network environments establishing an optimal SSON with a reasonable time and message/traffic complexity is challenging. This paper proposes a pattern-based methodology to establish the SSONs. This scheme enables setting up SSONs on demand without prior knowledge of the network topology and where the media processing capabilities are located in the underlying network. A new pattern referred to as path-directed search pattern is devised and applied to search for potential overlay nodes and to configure their media processing functions accordingly. The scheme is implemented on a pattern simulation tool and the result shows that SSONs of high quality can be built with a reasonable time and message/traffic complexity. © IFIP International Federation for Information Processing 2005.