Recent research on overlay networks has revealed that user-perceived network performance could be improved by an overlay routing mechanism. The effectiveness of overlay routing is mainly a result of the policy mismatch between the overlay routing and the underlay IP routing operated by ISPs. However, this policy mismatch causes a "free-riding" traffic problem, which may become harmful to the cost structure of Internet Service Providers. In the present paper, we define the free-riding problem in the overlay routing and evaluate the degree of free-riding traffic to reveal the effect of the problem on ISPs. We introduce a numerical metric to evaluate the degree of the free-riding problem and confirm that most multihop overlay paths that have better performance than the direct path brings the free-riding problem. We also discuss the guidelines for selecting paths that are more effective than the direct path and that mitigate the free-riding problem.

Recent research on overlay networks has revealed that user-perceived network performance, such as end-to-end delay performance, could be improved by an overlay routing mechanism. However, these studies consider only end-to-end delay, and few studies have focused on bandwidth-related information, such as available bandwidth and TCP throughput, which are important performance metrics especially for long-lived data transmission. In the present paper, we investigate the effect of overlay routing both delay and bandwidth-related information, based on the measurement results of network paths between PlanetLab nodes. We consider three metrics for selecting the overlay route: end-to-end delay, available bandwidth, and TCP throughput. We then show that the available bandwidth-based overlay routing provides significant gain, as compared with delay-based routing. We further reveal the correlation between the latency and available bandwidth of the overlay paths and propose several guidelines for selecting an overlay path.

In this paper, we present laboratory and field experimental results using High Speed Downlink Packet Access (HSDPA) test-beds in order to reveal the actual HSDPA performance based on key technologies such as base station (BS) scheduling, adaptive modulation and coding, hybrid automatic repeat request, and advanced receiver design. First, this paper evaluates the effects of advanced user equipment capabilities such as the maximum number of multi-codes, transmit diversity, receive diversity, and a chip equalizer. Increases in throughput of 60% and 85% due to using 10 and 15 codes were observed compared to 5 codes, respectively. The gain of 22% was obtained by applying closed-loop transmit diversity to the HSDPA network. Receive diversity improves the throughput in the region from low to high signal-to-interference ratio, and the gain of 45% was obtained by applying receive diversity to the conventional RAKE receiver. A throughput gain of approximately 17% due to the use of the chip equalizer was obtained and it was observed mainly in the high Ior/Ioc region and under multi-path conditions. Second, field experiments are conducted to elucidate the effects of multi-user diversity using a BS scheduling algorithm, and reveal that proportional fairness scheduling provides both the increase in sector throughput of 18% and a sufficient degree of fairness among users. The transmit control protocol (TCP)-level throughput performance is also investigated in order to reveal the actual end-user throughput. The results show that the throughput rate of approximately 90% of the throughput of the MAC-hs layer is achieved in the TCP layer in the laboratory experiments and in the field experiments.