Finding routing shortcuts using an internet coordinate system

Abstract

Overlay routing is a promising way to improve the quality of service in the Internet but its main drawback is scalability: measuring the characteristics of the paths, exchanging the measurement results between the nodes and computing the best routes in the full mesh overlay network generally imply a high consumption of resources. In this paper, we design the basis of a lightweight self-organising one-hop overlay routing mechanism improving the latencies: we define criteria that rely on the information provided by an Internet Coordinate System (ICS) in order to provide a small set of potential one-hop shortcuts for any given path in the network with a small measurement cost. Our best criterion does not guarantee to find the best shortcut for any given path in a network but, even in networks with hundreds or thousands of nodes, it will restrict the search for potential shortcuts to about one or two percent of the total number of nodes. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.