Newsflash: MACEDON is now end-of-life. Instead, please consider using its offspring project, Mace, which is very similar in style and approach.

Notice: There have been many requests for a version of MACEDON which can generate code for NS. Unfortunately, this feature is broken and can not easily be fixed. There are presently no plans to re-incorporate this feature into MACEDON. If you want to take up the cause, feel free to contact us with questions.

The goal of MACEDON (Methodology for Automatically Creating, Evaluating, and Designing Overlay Networks) is to facillitate the research and deployment of Overlay algorithms. To this end, MACEDON consists of three related pieces:

• A common overlay network API by which any MACEDON-created overlay implementation may be used
• A domain-specific C++ like language to describe an overlay's behavior from which real operating code (that functions over TCP/IP and in ns) can be generated
• A software engine that implements common features and functionality of overlay algorithms, providing a performance-tuned system that can be employed by any MACEDON-specified overlay

As a result, MACEDON allows algorithm designers to focus their attention on the algorithm itself and less on tedious implementation details. In the process, we promote code re-usability and fair comparisons of competing overlay network algorithms. The use of a common, yet extensible API, allows application developers to create a single implementation capable of executing over any overlay algorithm.

We currently have working implementations of the following overlay protocols:

• BulletPrime (USENIX 2005)
• Bullet (SOSP 2003)
• Chord (SIGCOMM 2001)
• Pastry (Middleware 2001)
• Scribe (JSAC 2002)
• SplitStream (SOSP 2003)
• Overcast (OSDI 2000)
• AMMO (ICDCS 2004, SARO is an instance of AMMO)
• RanSub (USITS 2003)
• NICE (SIGCOMM 2002)

For more information please reference NSDI 2004 publication below or our introductory presentation.

"Maintaining High Bandwidth under Dynamic Network Conditions", Dejan Kostic, Ryan Braud, Charles Killian, Erik Vandekieft, James W. Anderson, Alex C. Snoeren and Amin Vahdat, Proceedings of 2005 USENIX Annual Technical Conference (USENIX 2005), April 2005. [pdf]
"MACEDON: Methodology for Automatically Creating, Evaluating, and Designing Overlay Networks", Adolfo Rodriguez, Charles Killian, Sooraj Bhat, Dejan Kostic, and Amin Vahdat, Proceedings of the USENIX/ACM Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation (NSDI 2004), March 2004. [pdf]
"Scalability in Adaptive Multi-Metric Overlays", Adolfo Rodriguez, Dejan Kostic, and Amin Vahdat, The 24th International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems (ICDCS 2004), March 2004.[ps]
"Bullet: High Bandwidth Data Dissemination Using an Overlay Mesh", Dejan Kostic, Adolfo Rodriguez, Jeannie Albrecht, and Amin Vahdat, Proceedings of the 19th ACM Symposium on Operating System Principles (SOSP 2003), October 2003.[ps]
"Using Random Subsets to Build Scalable Network Services", Dejan Kostic, Adolfo Rodriguez, Jeannie Albrecht, Abhijeet Bhirud, and Amin Vahdat, Proceedings of the USENIX Symposium on Internet Technologies and Systems (USITS 2003), March 2003.[pdf]