environment at once. To that end, the structured
peer-to-peer overlay network approach is hereby
adapted onto the Inter-Cloud environment to manage
the consistency of the global information among
clouds and enhance the resistance to a large churn.
We propose a multi-ring structured overlay network
for the Inter-Cloud environment, in which nodes are
organized into one sub-ring and all sub-rings are
then composed to form a large single ring structured
network. The locality of nodes is considered when a
node decides to join into the sub-ring so that the
number of distant messages which are the messages
generated by the distant nodes can be decreased. The
global information is managed within the sub-ring so
that the cost and the complexity for managing the
global information can be reduced significantly.
Note that the cost for managing the global
information in our approach is a number of
messages used for requesting and updating data.
To evaluate the effectiveness of our proposed
technique, we analyze the stability of our network
and the efficiency of our technique in managing the
global information across the Inter-Cloud. We
implemented the overlay network simulator to
analyze reachability of the network, consistency and
availability of the global information. The results are
compared with other existing overlay networks such
as ring structured network, tree structured network
and unstructured network. We also applied several
scenarios to show the effectiveness of our algorithm
in real-world cases, for example, the scenario when
a large group of nodes decide to leave network at
once when they are not in-use. The results indicate
that, with our approach, the management cost for
global information is reduced while the stability of
the overlay network under churn can be maintained.
The reachability of network under churn is 8.2%
better than ring structured network and 23.1% better
than tree structured network by average. The number
of distant messages also decreases by 58.4% with
respect to the overall messages when considering
node locality.
2 RELATED WORK
Overlay network is a logical network that is built on
top of another network such as physical network or
IP network. Overlay network has been widely used
in distributed system especially the peer-to-peer
network. Overlay network can be categorized into
either unstructured network or structured network.
The unstructured network has minimal constraints
on the network topology and content distribution, so
it is suitable in highly dynamic and often ad-hoc
peer-to-peer environments. Most of popular peer-to-
peer applications nowadays operate on unstructured
networks, e.g., Gnutella (http://www.gnutella.com/)
and Freenet (http://free netproject.org/). In these
networks, peers connect to other peers in an ad-hoc
fashion. The location of the resources is not
controlled by a single centralized entity in the
system and there are no guarantees of query
solution. CLON (Matos et al, 2009) is the example
of the unstructured overlay network for cloud
environment. The authors aim to approximate the
structure of the physical network, while ensuring the
connectivity properties desirable to ensure reliable
dissemination of the gossip-based protocol. The
algorithm is based on SCAMP (Ganesh et al, 2003)
but also considered the locality of joining node so
that the number of messages traversing the long-
distant links can be significantly reduced.
On the other hand, the structured network has a
strict control on an underlying network structure, a
content publication strategy and query routing.
While the structured network is suitable for fast, low
cost resource lookup mechanism, it has a high
management cost for maintaining the topology of the
network. The examples of these networks are Chord
(Stoica et al, 2001), CAN (Ratnasamy et al, 2001),
and Tapesty (Zhao et al, 2001). All these networks
utilize the distributed hash table (DHT) for fast and
accurate resource lookup but have different network
topologies. In the case of cloud environment, the
network tends to be more reliable than peer-to-peer
network because nodes in the cloud environment are
usually part of the large data-center which has rich
network utility, so churn is unlikely to occur
frequently. For that reason, the structured network is
more suitable for cloud environment
Other interesting overlay network that related to
our proposed technique is ChordSPSA (Merz et al,
2009). ChordSPSA is a Chord-enhanced self-
organizing super-peer overlay which is designed to
suit the communication requirements of a peer-to-
peer desktop grid system. This overlay network
combines favourable properties of Chord rings and
fully meshed super-peer networks. The result from
the simulation shows that the algorithm can reduce
average message hop count in half compared to pure
Chord. Unfortunately, this algorithm is not designed
for cloud environment, so applied this algorithm
onto cloud may reduce the efficiency of algorithm.
There are also several works which focus on the
federated cloud. Aneka-Federation (Ranjan et al,
2009) is a decentralized and distributed system that
combines enterprise Clouds, overlay networking,
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