Overlay Networks

To my wife Yan, and my parents, for their love, support and encouragement iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS My first, and most earnest, acknowledgment must go to my advisor Dr. Mostafa Ammar, who led me into the exciting area of networking and telecommunications. His insights, experience, encouragement, and uncompromising emphasis on quality research guided me through my entire program of study. Much of this thesis work is collaboration with Dr. Constantine Dovrolis. I have learned substantially from his detail-oriented attitude, enthusiasm and dedication to precise and high quality research. I owe a lot to Dr. Admela Jukan for her compassion, dedication, and constant en-couragement during my early work in optical networks. This experience provided many important insights and valuable techniques to the thesis work presented here. Dr. Jun Xu offered me opportunities to work on network security projects and I a