A Transport Protocol for Multimedia Transmission in Overlay Networks

Overlay networks are opening up new ways for Internet usability, mainly by adding new services that are not available or cannot be implemented in the current Internet. Overlay networks use application level switches of intermediate nodes. However, the designs of overlay network are based on store-and-forward principles maintained by split TCP connections of hop-by-hop approaches and this can increase delay of packet delivery and cause unreliability of packet transmissions due to buffer overflow of the application level switch of each intermediate node, which has a limited buffer space. Also, hop-by-hop approaches for overlay networks cannot support end-to-end semantics. Thus, this study proposes a new Overlay Transport Protocol for overlay networks by considering management of end-to-end connection and congestion and flow control between source and destination nodes. By using a prototype implementation via simulation with MATLAB, We validate our analytical findings and evaluate the performance of proposed protocol which can provide end-to-end reliable data transfers, and also improve throughput in comparison with a network model where Overlay Transport Protocol layer is not available.