A Dynamic Topology And Routing Management Strategy For Virtual Ip Networks

This paper describes an architecture for deploying virtual IP networks with P2P-like dynamic topology and routing management. Existing virtual IP network deployment mechanisms do not allow for dynamic topology adaptation and fault-tolerance because provisioning of IP tunnels is performed only once-when a virtual network is deployed. We propose a P2P-XBone, in which a P2P protocol such as DHT drives the topology and the routing table of a virtual IP network consistent with its neighbor node state. We describe how to extend both the existing X-Bone system and P2P mechanisms to achieve interworking between them. The P2P-XBone not only provides P2P's characteristics such as self-organization, fault-tolerance and content-based routing to virtual IP networks but also provides higher forwarding performance and simpler implementation to P2P systems due to the support for the use of existing network services. We also show several results on the evaluation of overhead of P2P-driven provisioning and on forwarding performance.