Load Balancing and Clustering in Large-Scale Overlays
- Reference number
- IMF11-0051
- Start and end dates
- 110701-130630
- Amount granted
- 100 000 SEK
- Administrative organization
- Chalmers University of Technology
- Research area
- Information, Communication and Systems Technology
Summary
Overla can facilitate the collaboration between subsets of nodes/hosts of a network, towards common goals (e.g. resource sharing, community structures and more) Clustering in such networks is important: it can facilitate achieving locality and scalability for services –e.g. routing, resource finding and sharing in neighborhoods---, realizing interest-based/social groups and more; clustering can extend to security issues, with trust as a parameter. When it comes to resource sharing and community service, load balancing is aligned with clustering; it forms an incentive to achieve fairness and collaboration. This project aims to design and cluster overlay networks in dynamic environments and balance the load within them. One of our basic instruments will be random walks, which have been shown to be effective in the searching, dissemination and construction of overlay networks as a statistical process that associates with important parameters and properties of the corresponding graph. The proposing teams have complementary expertise on working with large networks (self-stabilization, locality-based algorithms respectively), as well as common interests and closely related recent work on large networks. Through our collaboration, which will be enabled by mutual visits, we will be able to combine our expertise and achieve even stronger results, as well as to project these on our future plans.
Popular science description
Overlay networks are defined by establishing special links between nodes in ordinary networks (e.g. between humans via social networks, between vehicles that use wireless communication components, between users in peer-to-peer networks). This application is about working for solving problems in such networks, that can facilitate the collaboration between nodes. The challenges are that the network may change frequently and that it may include mobile nodes. Applications can be found in the field of smart transportation systems, where overlays among communicating vehicles can be useful for coordinating traffic and even for preventing accidents; also in adaptive electric power grids, where overlays can play a role for facilitating distribution of power produced by new sources (e.g. wind) which are distributed (as opposed to centralized at the large powerplants).