Always On: A New Paradigm for Networks

With the popularity of services like Push-to-Talk, the need for "always on" services is becoming important for service providers. This paper addresses the problem of supporting always on services in existing and new network architectures. It defines the requirements of always on service, identifies the problems in supporting such a service, and proposes an overlay network based solution to make always on service a reality. Some results from initial protoyping and experimentation are also presented to demonstrate the feasibility of deploying such services.