Spines Overlay Network

The emergence of overlay network is for resolving the existent many problems of Internet to satisfy increasingly abundant traffic need. Overlay network is established on the IP network and don't need to do large-scale modification to the underlying network.Overlay network has good flexibility and fault tolerant performance.We can make overlay network differently according to the demand of the application.The dissertation mainly studies the Spines overlay network.The Spines is a generic overlay network platform with distributed architecture and we can add new application protocols to Spines to adapt application need.We first do a whole introduction to the Spines overlay network ,make a depiction of every function modules and algorithms and build a Spines simulating model in NS2.Then do a detailed research to the Spines two basic protocols State Flood protocol and the Hello protocol and make some improvement to them.Also we discuss some dynamic characteristises of the Spines.In chapter 4 we discuss the hop-by-hop transmission protocol and reliable end-to-end transmission, the simulations show that the hop-by-hop procotal has a better delay performance than TCP end-to-end transmission.As the current IP network can't provide an enough QoS support for the multimedia application, we make a discussion of the feasibility to build a multimedia overlay network based on Spines.Spines can provide a certain QoS support and has the advantage to build a multimedia overlay network.Finally we make an outlook of some problems for resolve to the Spines in the future.