Towards the Construction of Attack Resistant and Efficient Overlay Streaming Topologies

Even though overlay streaming is an inherently fault tolerant and stable system architecture, careful neighbor selection is a significant task. Inappropriate routing decisions can lead to an unstable topology with only a few very important nodes on which a large set of succeeding nodes depend. The presented algorithm selects streaming neighbors based on local information, passing knowledge to parent nodes only. Similar to SplitStream [Castro, M., P. Druschel, A. Kermarrec, A. Nandi, A. Rowstron and A. Singh, SplitStream: High-bandwidth content distribution in a cooperative environment, in: Proceedings of (IPTPS'03), 2003, pp. 298–313], it creates inner-node disjoint multicast trees. The created topologies are broad and have short paths, thus improving the resistance to node failure and intentional attacks. A malicious node can neither gain any knowledge about different regions of the topology other than its own successors nor deliberately move to a more important position in the hierarchy. The characteristics of the created topologies are revised in a static simulation study calculating the vertex connectivity and packet loss on node disconnections.