English

Optimal Routing for Delay-Sensitive Traffic in Overlay Networks

Networking and Internet Architecture 2019-04-19 v2

Abstract

We design dynamic routing policies for an overlay network which meet delay requirements of real-time traffic being served on top of an underlying legacy network, where the overlay nodes do not know the underlay characteristics. We pose the problem as a constrained MDP, and show that when the underlay implements static policies such as FIFO with randomized routing, then a decentralized policy, that can be computed efficiently in a distributed fashion, is optimal. Our algorithm utilizes multi-timescale stochastic approximation techniques, and its convergence relies on the fact that the recursions asymptotically track a nonlinear differential equation, namely the replicator equation. Extensive simulations show that the proposed policy indeed outperforms the existing policies.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1703.07419,
  title  = {Optimal Routing for Delay-Sensitive Traffic in Overlay Networks},
  author = {Rahul Singh and Eytan Modiano},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1703.07419},
  year   = {2019}
}
R2 v1 2026-06-22T18:53:08.057Z