Grido is an architecture that targets a network operator intending to provide enhanced services to its customers. This is achieved by setting up a "backbone" overlay network. A backbone overlay is a set of Internet hosts dedicated to providing overlay services. A network operator can view Grido as a sandbox for rapid prototyping and market adoption assessment of novel services. In the past, overlay networks have been designed to mitigate deployment issues of functionalities such as multicast and QoS at the network layer. Grido provides a WS-Agreement based negotiation interface complying with the current Global Grid Forum (GGF) standards. We propose to use a novel virtual coordinates-assisted overlay construction and maintenance protocol.

We demonstrate using simulations, that Grido incurs a low latency overhead while maintaining sparse connectivity on the backbone overlay. Grido also incurs low overhead for virtual coordinates estimation and chooses the closest 5% overlay node to any IP address, 95% of the time.