Fluidify: Decentralized Overlay Deployment in a Multi-cloud World

Abstract : As overlays get deployed in large, heterogeneous systems-of-systems with stringent performance constraints, their logical topology must exploit the locality present in the underlying physical network. In this paper, we propose a novel decentralized mechanism—Fluidify—for deploying an overlay network on top of a physical infrastructure while maximizing network locality. Fluidify uses a dual strategy that exploits both the logical links of an overlay and the physical topology of its underlying network. Simulation results show that in a network of 25,600 nodes, Fluidify is able to produce an overlay with links that are on average 94% shorter than that produced by a standard decentralized approach based on slicing, while demonstrating a sub-linear time complexity.