JITeR: Just-in-time application-layer routing

The paper addresses the problem of providing message latency and reliability assurances for control traffic in wide-area IP networks. This is an important problem for cloud services and other geo-distributed information infrastructures that entail inter-datacenter real-time communication. We present the design and validation of JITeR (Just-In-Time Routing), an algorithm that timely routes messages at application-layer using overlay networking and multihoming, leveraging the natural redundancy of wide-area IP networks. We implemented a prototype of JITeR that we evaluated experimentally by placing nodes in several regions of Amazon EC2. We also present a scenario-based (geo-distributed utility network) evaluation comparing JITeR with alternative overlay/multihoming routing algorithms that shows that it provides better timeliness and reliability guarantees.