Resilient Overlay Networks

The MIT RON (Resilient Overlay Networks) project is a DARPA-funded effort motivated by the desire to improve the robustness and availability of Internet paths between hosts by an order of magnitude over today's wide-area Internet routing infrastructure. The key design goal in RON is to develop techniques to allow end-hosts and applications to cooperatively gain improved reliability and performance from the Internet. At a glance, RON nodes examine the condition of the Internet between themselves and the other nodes, and, based upon how the network looks, decide if they should let packets flow directly to other nodes, or if they should send them indirectly via other RON nodes. For instance, the group of cooperating systems below can mutually provide a more available and better-performing routing service than what vanilla Internet routing can provide.

RON is an architecture that allows a small group of distributed Internet applications to detect and recover from path outages and periods of degraded performance within several seconds, improving over today's wide-area routing protocols that take at least several minutes to recover. A RON is an application-layer overlay on top of the existing Internet routing substrate. The RON nodes monitor the functioning and quality of the Internet paths among themselves, and use this information to decide whether to route packets directly over the Internet or by way of other RON nodes, optimizing application-specific routing metrics.

RON is part of a larger research agenda on large-scale, robust, Internet-based distributed systems, which spans areas ranging from resilient routing (as in RON) to emerging peer-to-peer systems. Our work on peer-to-peer systems is based on Chord, a scalable p2p lookup service.

RON is also closely related to other current projects at LCS in the area of robust Internet infrastructures and uses some of the ideas from these projects: CM , the Inernet Congestion Manager; and Click-SMP , a modular PC-based router.

RON data, Internet experiments

RON deployment sites

Since early 2001, we have run a real-life RON, which now has 17 sites located around the Internet. Our deployment is international. We have also collected extensive data sets and analyzed them. They will soon be made publicly available on this page.

Papers

Talks

Resources

People

Faculty/PIs: Hari Balakrishnan M. Frans Kaashoek David Karger Robert Morris

Graduate Students: David Andersen Nick Feamster Jaeyeon Jung Todd Nightingale Stan Rost Alex Snoeren Jacob Strauss

Collaborators: Ion Stoica

Related research

Projects

The Detour Project at the University of Washington. They developed "sting", which uses TCP to determine forward andvreverse path packet loss rates. There has also been a small project follow-on to Detour by some of David Wetherall's students to test Detour. They simulated some algorithms for forming the routing topology: [Orig ps] [Local Mirror] The projects list is also available.
There are some important differences between RON and Detour. First. RON seeks to prevent disruptions in end-to-end communication in the face of failures. RON takes advantage of underlying Internet path redundancy on time-scales of a few seconds, reacting responsively to path outages and performance failures. Second, RON is designed as an application-controlled routing overlay; because each RON is more closely tied to the application using it, RON more readily integrates application-specific path metrics and path selection policies. Third, we present and analyze experimental results from a real-world deployment of a RON to demonstrate fast recovery from failure and improved latency and loss-rates even over short time-scales.
The Berkeley SPAND project. The Spared Passive Network Performance toolkit lets applications measure and share performance information with other local clients to make better guesses about which (for example) mirror site to use. The SPAND paper contains more information [ps] local ps] as does Mark Stemm's thesis [html] [ps] [local ps].
RAMP Reliable Adaptive Multipath Routing, from UCSD.

Network Characterization

Craig Labovitz's BGP and network stability information and Delayed Internet Routing convergence paper. (30-second to 3-minute outages from BGP fluctuations.)
Inter-AS traffic patterns (Fang & Peterson, Princeton)
Much work at ACIRI

Measurement Tools

The IETF's Internet Protocol Performance Metrics project.
The CAIDA Network Measurement Tools Taxonomy
The IDMaps Project (Internet Distance Maps). Creating a "server" that can provide pairwise Internet distance information.
Commercial tools: VisualRoute measures per-hop loss and delays. VitalSigns NetMedic uses bprobes and application-specific metrics to report network performance.

Overlay Networks

The X-Bone Project provides a toolkit for rapid deployment of overlay network for things like IPv6.
A follow-on project, Dynabone plans to add dynamic overlay adaptation.
6bone- IPv6 overlay
The MBone FAQ - multicast overlay
VNS uses overlays to provide Quality of Service.
End-system multicast from CMU
Yallcast is an open-source content distribution topology using a shared tree or mesh topology. [ Architecture Description]
UUNET's Denial Of Service tracking overlay (NANOG talk).

Funding

We gratefully acknowledge funding for RON from DARPA under the Fault-Tolerant Networking (FTN) program of the ATO; it is being supported by DARPA and the Space and Naval Warfare Systems Center (SPAWAR), San Diego, under contract N66001-00-1-8933.

overview	-	what RON's all about
papers	-	Papers and publications
talks	-	selected presentation slides
data	-	RON experimental data [RON1 and RON2, Live & archived BGP feed, dns]
sites	-	RON wide-area testbed sites
resources	-	links for packet traces, routing data, etc.
related research	-	past and current projects that share some of RON's goals
people	-	who are we?
funding	-	who sponsors RON?

Overview