Interaction of overlay networks
Wenjie Jiang, John C. S. Lui, Dah Ming Chiu · ACM SIGMETRICS Performance Evaluation Review · 2005
Although the concept of application layer overlay routing has received much attention lately, there has been little focus on the "coexistence" and "interaction" of overlays on top of the same physical network. In this paper, we show that when each overlay plays the optimal routing strategy so as to optimize its own performance, there exists an equilibrium point for the overall routing strategy. However, the equilibrium may be inefficient: (a) it may not be Pareto optimal, (b) some fairness anomalies of resource allocation may occur. This is worthy of attention since overlays can be easily deployed and overlays may not know the existence of each other, they may continue to operate at a sub-optimal point.