Resilient Overlay Networks

This paper presents the concept of a Resilient Overlay Network (RON) that provides reliable packet delivery by reducing detection and recovery time following network failures or outages. The authors discuss the scalability advantages that come along with the hierarchical organization of the Internet and then describe some disadvantages in terms of reliable packet delivery. Inter-domain routing with BGP can damp routing updates to minimize oscillations; this distortion of link-state information inevitably leads to suboptimal fault tolerance. RON nodes are deployed in various domains and communicate with each other to provide optimal packet delivery, via either direct Internet paths or other RON nodes.

These application-layer overlay networks are a neat concept and somewhat reminiscent of middleboxes - an intermediary structure to bypass certain shortcomings of the Internet infrastructure. One important point that the authors make is that forwarding via at most one RON node provides sufficient reliability gains. Even so, I'm not sure a) how the modern Internet would react to a heavy influx (not just a small set as in this paper) of RON nodes b) whether inter-domain routing latency and distortion is still a big enough problem today to warrant the use of RONs. Interesting paper, must say.