iOverlay: A lightweight middleware infrastructure for overlay application implementations

Abstract

The very nature of implementing and evaluating fully distributed algorithms or protocols in application-layer overlay networks involves certain programming tasks that are at best mundane and tedious - and at worst challenging - even at the application level. In this paper, we present {Overlay, a lightweight and high-performance middleware infrastructure that addresses these problems in a novel way by providing clean, well-documented layers of middleware components. The internals of iOverlay are carefully designed and implemented to maximize its performance, without sacrificing the simplicity of application implementations using iOverlay. We illustrate the effectiveness of iOverlay by rapidly implementing a set of overlay applications, and report our findings and experiences by deploying them on PlanetLab, the wide-area overlay network testbed that iOverlay conveniently supports. © IFIP International Federation for Information Processing 2004.