Abstract—As the rapid proliferation of multimedia communications has been significantly challenging the Internet on providing a high-quality transporting service to achieve desirable audio and video user experience, overlay routing is proposed as a practical technique to complement some inherent deficiencies of the current IP routing service. While many research and realistic systems have proven the effectiveness of overlay routing on improving end-to-end (E2E) performance, this paper performs a measurement study on the potential benefits of open routers, a novel promising technical concept emerging recently, to boost overlay routing for multimedia communications. Based on analysis of a large amount of measurements collected between more than 200 PlanetLab sites over the world, our results show that when being deployed appropriately, even a small number of open routers will be able to remarkably enhance overlay routing’s ability of improving E2E performance for multimedia communications. Accordingly, several practical heuristics for selecting suitable places to deploy open routers are proposed and comparatively evaluated based on real Internet topological and routing data.

Index Terms—overlay routing, open routers, multimedia communications, heuristic deployment

Cite:Li Tang， Yin Huai， Jin Zhou， Hao Yin， Zhen Chen，and  Jun Li, "A Measurement Study on the Benefits of Open Routers for Overlay Routing," Journal of Communications, vol. 4, no.9, pp.714-723, 2009. Doi: 10.4304/jcm.4.9.714-723