Topology design of a service overlay network for e-science applications

Nowadays, large-scale numerical simulation, data analysis, remote access to experimental apparatus and cooperative working play a key role in the practice of science and engineering. In this scenario, highly distributed grid environments, including computing, storage and instrument elements, have to be interconnected through high performance networks. In addition, grid applications often have stringent requirements in terms of Quality of Service (QoS), flexibility, network resource provision. Unfortunately, these network requirements can not be easily satisfied, because today's Internet only provides a best-effort packet delivery service. In the past few years, overlay networks have emerged as a profitable way to come through the limitation of the current Internet and to provide value-added network services (QoS, multicasting, security, etc.). This chapter is focused on overlay topology design and, more specifically, on the choice of the best option within a limited set of topology layouts that allows to fulfill QoS network requirements (bandwidth, delay). The problem is formulated as the minimization of a cost function which takes into account traffic demand and latency. Apart from existing overlay topologies, a new traffic demand-aware topology is proposed. Guidelines for the selection of the best topology are provided through extensive simulations. © 2011 Springer Science+Business Media, LLC