Overview of Solution

• The conceptual design of RON, shown in Figure 3, is quite simple. RON nodes, deployed at various locations on the Internet, form an application-layer overlay to cooperatively route packets for each other. Each RON node monitors the quality of the Internet paths between it and other nodes, and uses this information to intelligently select paths for packets. Each Internet path between two nodes is called a virtual link. To discover the topology of the overlay network and obtain information about all virtual links in the topology, every RON node participates in a routing protocol to exchange information about a variety of quality metrics. Most of RON’s design supports routing through multiple intermediate nodes, but our results (Section 6) show that using at most one intermediate RON node is sufficient most of the time. Therefore, parts of our design focus on finding better paths via a single intermediate RON node.

• D. Anderson, H. Balakrishnan, F. Kaashoek, and R. Morris, “Resilient Overlay Networks”