Towards Path Quality Metrics for Overlay Networks

Decentralized systems, such as overlay networks or content delivery networks, form a virtual network on top of a physical network leading to inefficiencies in handling network traffic as physical locations are not considered. Therefore, this work investigates, analyzes, and evaluates two feasible network locality metrics for decentralized systems to overcome such inefficiencies. Furthermore, those metrics to determine network locality have been implemented and evaluated within an international testbed. These metrics evaluated consider aspects of path stability and path symmetry. The evaluation performed did reveal that the stability and symmetry metrics provide accurate locality indication.