Selfish overlay network creation and maintenance
IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking (TON)
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Overlay networks have been used for adding and enhancing functionality to the end-users. Previous work focused on devising neighbor selection heuristics under the assumption that users conform to a specific wiring protocol. This thesis goes against the conventional thinking that overlay users conform to a specific protocol. The contributions of this thesis are threefold. It provides a systematic evaluation of the design space of Selfish Neighbor Selection (SNS) strategies in real overlays, evaluates the performance of overlay networks of selfish users, and examines the implications of selfish neighbor and server selection to overlay protocol design and service provisioning respectively. This thesis develops a game-theoretic framework that provides a unified approach to modeling SNS wiring procedures. The model is general, and takes into consideration network delays, user preference profiles, and connectivity constraints imposed on the system designer. Within this framework the notion of user's "best response" wiring strategy is formalized as a k-median problem on asymmetric distance and is used to obtain pure Nash equilibria. Evaluation results presented in this thesis indicate that selfish users can reap substantial performance benefits when connecting to overlay networks composed of non-selfish users. In addition, in overlays that are dominated by selfish users, the resulting stable wirings are optimized to such great extent that even naïve newcomers can extract near-optimal performance. To capitalize on the performance advantages of SNS strategies, this thesis presents EGOIST: an SNS-inspired overlay routing system. Through an extensive measurement study, results presented in this thesis show that EGOIST's neighbor selection primitives outperform existing heuristics on a variety of performance metrics, including delay, available bandwidth, and node utilization. EGOIST is competitive with an optimal but unsealable full-mesh approach, remains effective under churn, is robust to cheating, and incurs minimal overheads. This thesis also studies SNS strategies for swarming applications. In the context of service provisioning, this thesis examines the use of distributed approaches that enable a provider to determine the number and location of servers for optimal delivery of content or services to its selfish end-users. To leverage recent advances in virtualization technologies, this thesis develops and evaluates a distributed protocol to migrate servers based on end-users demand and local topological knowledge.