On the Significance of Layer-3 Traffic Forwarding

Abstract

Designing performance-enhanced and large-scale overlay networks over the conventional IP substrate encounters different implementation obstacles put in place by Internet Service Providers (ISPs). These include lack of proper privileges and restrictive routing policies that prevent the overlay services from being deployed easily. The evolution of Software Defined Networks (SDNs), however, helps to address these concerns by simplifying the mechanism for overlay router design. In this paper, we have included an analysis of 18,906 delay traces from a network of 138 hosts. Our main aim was to demonstrate the rich existence of IP overlay paths that can be leveraged to significantly enhance Internet routing performance. We try to make the case for using layer-3 forwarding minimum delay overlay paths by demonstrating superior performance in this approach compared to existing overlay designs which work mostly at the TCP and application layers. In particular, the study was conducted to benefit applications that are sensitive to end-to-end delay and throughput. This paper presents a specific analysis of end-to-end delay in order to enhance TCP performance. The current work aims at increasing throughput and reducing file transfer time via overlay while maintaining simplicity and preserving all TCP characteristics. The results of this study show that the use of the shortest delay paths between physically disjoint node pairs can benefit TCP throughput and minimize file transfer time by orders of magnitude. The ultimate objective behind this study is to develop a reliable and scalable over-lay design for file transfers that require high transmission rates.