Evolving a Manageable Internet

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Evolving a Manageable Internet

• Tom Anderson
• University of Washington

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Internet at an Impasse

• The Internets current evolutionary path will not
  address its fundamental challenges
  
• Security
• Security costs of connecting to the Internet
  dwarf bandwidth costs no end in sight to
  viruses, worms, DoS, spam
  
• Robustness
• End to end reliability orders of magnitude lower
  than phone service
  
• Manageability
• State of the art tweak and pray
• Performance
• End to end performance orders of magnitude slower
  than the raw hw
  
• Evolvability
• QoS, ad hoc networks, mobility, etc.

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What is to be done?

• Do we know how to fix these problems?
• If we did know, could we implement the fix?
• Answer is no to both, for todays Internet
• Little to no conceptual understanding of how to
  address these issues
  
• Little to no ability to implement changes to the
  Internet architecture, except via point solutions
  that often make matters worse in the long run
  
• Analogy with programming languages in 80s/90s
• dominant standards in industry crowd out academic
  innovation eventually more radical approaches
  succeed

4
Internet Myth Thin Waist

• Simple, universal end to end packet delivery
  service, implemented by multiple, cooperating
  service providers

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Internet Reality Thick Waist

• Any architectural change requires global
  agreement
  
• ISPs have little incentive or ability to evolve
  architecture
  
• result ossification with feature creep

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RIP Thesis

• Services can only have two out of three among
• multiprovider (e.g., planetary scale)
• high level interface (e.g., IP)
• evolvability
• Examples IP, email, telephony, CDNs, multicast,

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A New Model for Planetary Services

• RIP horizontal, planetary-scale service
  providers
  
• At base, a virtual hardware abstraction (cycles
  and bit pipes to neighbors) layer
  planetary-scale services on top

IP as a service
Routing
Resource Management
Information plane
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Why now?

• Rate of increase in cycles/ internet bw/
• Jim Gray (2003) Cost of sending TCP ack 500K
  instructions
  
• What about future?
• Moores Law vastly understates potential for CPU
  improvement 60 squared (density) 30 (cycle
  time) 20 (volume)
  
• Raw optics improving at a similar rate captive
  backbones
  
• Cumulative improvement in the engineering of
  distributed systems
  
• We understand how to engineer secure, reliable,
  efficient distributed systems, if we aren't
  constrained by legacy systems

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Overlays as a Disruptive Technology

• Add a new layer to the network architecture
• overlay networks
• Challenges
• isolate services from each other and the
  Internet
  
• exploit planetary-scale cooperation/vantage
  points
  
• become the intermediary for WAN packets

overlay

• purpose-built virtual networks that use the
  existing Internet for transmission
  
• the Internet was once deployed as an overlay on
  top of the telephony network

Internet
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Evolution Requirements

• Any new architecture needs to be
• Incentive compatible for end users
• Opt-in at a fine-grain (hijack packets via name
  xlation)
  
• Overlay routing for reliability, bandwidth,
  latency
  
• PCP to manage legacy Internet paths
• Incentive compatible for hardware providers
• Avoid 95 charging intervals
• Win-win bilateral barter
• Self-managing, secure, evolvable as an engineered
  solution
  

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Example Multiple ISP Negotiation
anarchy
barter
cumulative of flows
path length inflation
relative to socially optimal

• Bilateral barter closely approximates socially
  optimal
  
• Reduces need for manual route tweaks

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Summary

• Make security, manageability, efficiency, etc.
  engineering problems, not political ones