Self-Organizing Network Services
Hani Jamjoom, Sugih Jamin, Kang Geun Shin · 1999
There is a proliferation of application-level servers that offer enhanced network services beyond the simple packet forwarding provided by the underlying network infrastructure. Examples of such servers range from Web server mirrors, Web caches, Web page distilling proxies, video transcoders, and application-level multicast routers, to application-level load-adaptive multipath routers. A fundamental question arising from the deployment of such servers is where to place them within a network. This paper explores technical issues related to the creation of an infrastructure to allow self-organization of network service placement based on observed demand for each service. In so doing, we propose a framework, called Sortie, whereby services are allocated on network nodes based on a set of very simple rules independently executed by each node. The distributed nature of allocation decisions ensures the scalability of the framework. We also present simulation results confirming the stability ...