Performance evaluation of a method to reduce inter-ISP transit cost caused by overlay routing

Abstract

Overlay routing is an application-level routing mechanism and existing research has revealed that overlay routing can improve user-perceived performance. On the other hand, overlay routing may harm the ISPs' cost structure because of the policy mismatch between IP routing and overlay routing. In a previous study, we proposed a method to reduce inter-ISP transit cost caused by overlay routing while maintaining the effectiveness of the overlay routing. However, we evaluated the proposed method only in the PlanetLab environment, the node location of which is biased to North America. In addition, the previous evaluation focused only on limiting the degree of increase in the inter-ISP transit cost and did not explicitly consider the performance of the overlay routing. In the present paper, we evaluate the proposed method in more general network environments, which are the generalized PlanetLab environment and the Japanese commercial ISPs network environment. We also evaluate the performance of the proposed method in terms of the trade-off relationships between the overlay routing performance and the inter-ISP transit cost over the entire network. In addition, we discuss the differences in the network properties in both environments, which affect the performance of the proposed method.