Using self-regulation to increase resilience in overlay networks for interactive multimedia communications

• Published in: Peer-to-peer networking and applications Vol. 12; no. 4; pp. 763 - 776
• Main Authors: Nuño, Pelayo, Granda, Juan C., Suárez, Francisco J., García, Daniel F.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: New York Springer US 01.07.2019; Springer Nature B.V
• Subjects: Bandwidths; Communications Engineering; Computer Communication Networks; Engineering; Ethernet; Information Systems and Communication Service; Multimedia; Multimedia communications; Networks; Reflectors; Resilience; Signal,Image and Speech Processing; Self-stabilization; Overlay networks; Resilience; Self-regulation
• ISSN: 1936-6442; 1936-6450
• DOI: 10.1007/s12083-018-0670-0

Overlay networks are the underlying mechanisms which enable multipoint communications in interactive multimedia platforms. They must cope with constraints on heterogeneity, scalability and availability, making their management complex. Thus, several issues might affect the resilience of overlay networks, threatening ongoing communications. Overlay networks usually use self-organization and self-stabilization techniques to improve resilience. Techniques implementing other self-management properties such as self-regulation may also improve the resilience of the overlay. In this paper, the resilience of a reflector-based overlay network is improved with a self-regulation scheme based on audio transcoding and audio mixing. This scheme balances the workloads of the reflectors and saves network resources. As a result, the overlay is more resilient to failures in the reflectors. Extensive simulations have been carried out to compare various transcoding and mixing approaches, proving that self-regulation improves the resilience of the overlay network with little impact on end-to-end latency.