[ih] Overlay networks

[Joe Touch]

> On Aug 20, 2025, at 4:51 AM, Lawrence Stewart via Internet-history <internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:
> 
> After the discussion about the Arpanet routing being shortest path I am wondering if anyone experimented with overlay networks.

Yeah - it was a whole area of research starting in the late 90s to today.  I didn’t recall them many levels deep and wide - https://www.strayalpha.com/virtual-nets/

There were many earlier versions that used the approach, with the first that influenced the field being the m-bone that allowed multicast to be deployed on a net that didn’t natively support it.

> If the hosts know the the topology and the network routing algorithm, they can build a network with a different routing algorithm on top of the existing network by essentially doing store and forward at the hosts while using the base network only as links.

Yes, that was at least one reason for them. There are others in the papers/ projects linked at the site below.

> The first time I heard of this was Sandia Labs work on GUPS (or HPCC Random Access) in 2004, which achieved much better than expected results on Red Storm by aggregating small application messages for transport over the base network.  A small message might traverse the base network several times, but the advantage of large messages was so great that it overcame the inefficiency.
> 
> The idea also turns up in collective algorithms in MPI, SHMEM, and others

There’s a summary of work with links that at least once worked here:
https://www.strayalpha.com/xbone/

My later doc cousin is that these nets are just a special case of layering and that tunnels are just links not unlike any other. The whole system is recursive, not 7-layered, with the actual physical network being the base case. I.e., the ability of an overlay to control routing at its layer isn’t any different than IP relaying over Ethernet, or email relaying over TCP (as the bundle protocols of DTN prove).

I came at that from a comm theory side and coined it recursive networking in the X-Bone overlay deployment system as RNA (recursive networking architecture), though the term came up earlier in a less generalized form in Andrew Campbells Resilient Overlay Network overlay system. John Day (who frequents this list) came to a similar view from the process/OS side originally called network IPC (interprocess comm) as it was later renamed RINA (I for Internet).

So overlays go back over 20yrs as an active area of investigation before the ones you found. Anyone know of earlier that explicitly layered a net on a working net? (Vs ones that arguably to this with different layers, as with bang-path routing of email in the 1980s)

Joe