CORS: A cooperative overlay routing service to enhance interactive multimedia communications

As interactive multimedia communications are developing rapidly on the Internet, they present stringent challenges on end-to-end (E2E) performance. On the other hand, however, the Internet’s architecture (IPv4) remains almost the same as it was originally designed for only data transmission purpose, and has experienced big hurdle to actualize QoS universally. This paper designs a cooperatively overlay routing service (CORS) aiming to overcome the performance limit inherent in the Internet’s IP-layer routing service. The key idea of CORS is to efficiently compose a number of eligible application-layer paths with suitable relays in the overlay network. Besides the direct IP path, CORS can transfer data simultaneously through one or more application-layer paths to adaptively satisfy the data’s application-specific requirements on E2E performance. Simulation results indicate the proposed schemes are scalable and effective. Practical experiments based on a prototype implemented on PlanetLab show that CORS is feasible to enhance the transmission reliability and the quality of multimedia communications.