A structured peer-to-peer method to discover QoS enhanced alternate paths

In the next generation Internet, the network should not only be considered as a communication medium, but also as an endless source of services available to the end-systems. These services (i.e. overlay applications) would be composed of multiple cooperative distributed software elements that dynamically build an ad hoc communication mesh (i.e. an overlay association). In a previous contribution, we proposed a collaborative distributed method to provide enhanced QoS between end-points within an overlay association. This method aims at discovering and utilizing composite alternate end-to-end paths that experience better QoS than the default path given by the IP routing mechanisms. In this paper we present our investigations on a modification to this method. This modification aims at improving its scalability by structuring participating nodes into a coordinate space and by using an alternative scheme to construct the lists of candidate relay nodes for the alternate path discovery method.