EAGER: Collaborative Research: Enabling Economic Policies in Software-Defined Internet Exchange Points

EAGER：协作研究：在软件定义的互联网交换点中实现经济政策

• 批准号: 1551444
• 负责人: Tilman Wolf
• 金额: $ 15万
• 依托单位: University of Massachusetts Amherst
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2015
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2015-10-01 至 2018-09-30
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1551444&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: EAGER; Collaborative; Research; Enabling; Economic

Internet routing---particularly inter-domain routing---suffers from a long list of well-known problems that makes it difficult to innovate new types of end-to-end services and applications. Routing decisions are made locally by routers based on policies that users and their applications have little control over, resulting in routing decisions that are not optimized for users or their applications. Moreover, the "money flow," from customers through a sequence of providers that handle their packets, is determined by business relationships (service-level agreements (SLAs)) among providers---which change very slowly. One consequence is that it is virtually impossible in today's Internet to offer an end-to-end service with any real predictability of quality, let alone a guarantee. Moreover, concerns about network providers discriminating against some providers? content (see the net neutrality debate) add another dimension of complexity. Software-Defined Networking (SDN) is an emerging networking paradigm in which data traffic is routed at the granularity of individual flows by a programmable controller. The ability to route flows at a finer granularity than destination prefixes, and the potential for various stakeholders to express and enforce routing policies for their traffic have made SDN appealing also for inter-domain routing. At the same time, an increasing number of inter-provider connections are being realized at Internet Exchange Points (IXPs). In this context, Software-Defined Internet Exchange Points (SDX) have been proposed as a way for multiple providers to collectively control the routing decisions at Internet Exchange Points (IXPs). Most SDX research has focused on the problems associated with composed and possibly conflicting policies specified by providers or with scalability issues implementing flow-level policies at major IXPs with large numbers of flow. Intellectual Merit: While SDXs hold great potential, they also exhibit considerable challenges: SDXs offer mechanisms to enforce (certain types of) policies, but they do not define policies. The frameworks needed to define policies are an open area of research. Policies are typically derived from economic relationships established between providers, or between providers and their customers. Moreover, access to, and use of, resources at an SDX itself (e.g., network capacity, processing, and storage) requires that an economic relationship be established between a provider and the SDX. In other words, SDXs act as marketplaces, marketing their resources to providers (e.g., the right to use link bandwidth, processing cycles, and storage), and SDXs provide a way for providers to market their (transit) services to other providers on behalf of their customers. Current SDX designs do not consider these economic relationships and thus omit a critical aspect of Internet operation. This project includes fundamental research aimed at the design of controllers for Software-Defined Internet Exchange Points that can be programmed to implement end-to-end (i.e., inter-domain) routing policies that are tied to explicit economic relationships between network entities. Broader Impacts: The results from this research have the potential for a transformative impact on how inter-domain routing---which is at the core of economic interactions between network providers in the Internet---is implemented and used to provide novel services in networks. The interdisciplinary nature of this work---crossing the boundaries of engineering and economics---presents particular challenges in developing solutions that are technically sound and can be adopted in practice. The work involves an education component. Results from our work will be disseminated in the form of open-source toolsets and publications.

互联网路由--尤其是域间路由-存在一长串众所周知的问题，使创新新型的端到端服务和应用变得困难。路由决策由路由器基于用户及其应用程序几乎无法控制的策略在本地做出，从而导致未针对用户或其应用程序进行优化的路由决策。此外，从客户通过处理其分组的一系列提供商的“资金流”是由提供商之间的业务关系(服务级别协议(SLA))决定的-这种关系变化非常缓慢。一个后果是，在当今的互联网上，几乎不可能提供真正可预测质量的端到端服务，更不用说保证了。此外，对网络提供商歧视一些提供商的担忧？内容(参见网络中立性辩论)增加了复杂性的另一个维度。软件定义网络(SDN)是一种新兴的网络模式，其中数据流量由可编程控制器以单个流量的粒度进行路由。SDN能够以比目的地前缀更精细的粒度来路由流量，并且各种利益相关者有可能表达和执行其流量的路由策略，这使得SDN对域间路由也很有吸引力。与此同时，在互联网交换点(IXP)实现了越来越多的提供商间连接。在此背景下，软件定义的互联网交换点(SDX)被提出为多个提供商共同控制互联网交换点(IXP)处的路由决策的一种方式。大多数SDX研究都集中在与提供商指定的组合的且可能冲突的策略相关的问题，或者与在具有大量流的主要IXP实施流级策略的可扩展性问题相关的问题。智力优势：虽然SDX拥有巨大的潜力，但它们也显示出相当大的挑战：SDX提供了执行(某些类型的)政策的机制，但它们不定义政策。定义政策所需的框架是一个开放的研究领域。保单通常源自提供商之间或提供商与其客户之间建立的经济关系。此外，访问和使用SDX本身的资源(例如，网络容量、处理和存储)需要在提供商和SDX之间建立经济关系。换句话说，SDX充当市场，向提供商推销其资源(例如，链路带宽、处理周期和存储的使用权)，而SDX为提供商提供了一种代表其客户向其他提供商推销其(中转)服务的方式。当前的SDX设计没有考虑这些经济关系，因此忽略了互联网运营的一个关键方面。该项目包括旨在为软件定义的互联网交换点设计控制器的基础研究，这些交换点可以被编程以实现与网络实体之间的显式经济关系捆绑在一起的端到端(即域间)路由策略。更广泛的影响：这项研究的结果可能会对如何实施和使用域间路由--这是互联网网络提供商之间经济互动的核心--在网络中提供新的服务产生革命性的影响。这项工作的跨学科性质-跨越工程学和经济学的界限-在制定技术上合理并可在实践中采用的解决方案方面提出了特别的挑战。这项工作涉及到教育部分。我们的工作成果将以开放源码工具包和出版物的形式传播。