Abstract
Recent research on overlay networks has revealed that user-perceived network performance, such as end-to-end delay performance, could be improved by an overlay routing mechanism. However, these studies consider only end-to-end delay, and few studies have focused on bandwidth-related information, such as available bandwidth and TCP throughput, which are important performance metrics especially for long-lived data transmission. In the present paper, we investigate the effect of overlay routing both delay and bandwidth-related information, based on the measurement results of network paths between PlanetLab nodes. We consider three metrics for selecting the overlay route: end-to-end delay, available bandwidth, and TCP throughput. We then show that the available bandwidth-based overlay routing provides significant gain, as compared with delay-based routing. We further reveal the correlation between the latency and available bandwidth of the overlay paths and propose several guidelines for selecting an overlay path.
