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: 1551453
• 负责人: James Griffioen
• 金额: $ 14.99万
• 依托单位: University of Kentucky Research Foundation
• 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 2019-09-30
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1551453&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.

Internet路由——尤其是域间路由——受到一长串众所周知的问题的困扰，这些问题使得难以创新新型的端到端服务和应用程序。路由决策是由路由器根据策略在本地做出的，而用户及其应用程序对这些策略几乎没有控制权，这导致路由决策没有针对用户或其应用程序进行优化。此外，从客户到一系列处理其数据包的提供商的“资金流”是由提供商之间的业务关系（服务水平协议（sla））决定的，这种关系的变化非常缓慢。一个后果是，在今天的互联网上，提供具有任何真正可预测质量的端到端服务实际上是不可能的，更不用说保证了。此外，是否担心网络提供商歧视某些提供商？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）是一种新兴的网络范例，其中数据流量由可编程控制器按单个流的粒度进行路由。以比目标前缀更细的粒度路由流的能力，以及各种利益相关者为其流量表达和执行路由策略的潜力，使得SDN在域间路由方面也具有吸引力。与此同时，越来越多的提供商之间的连接正在互联网交换点（ixp）上实现。在这种情况下，软件定义的互联网交换点（SDX）被提议作为一种方法，用于多个提供商共同控制互联网交换点（ixp）的路由决策。大多数SDX研究都集中在与提供商指定的组合且可能冲突的策略相关的问题上，或者在具有大量流的主要ixp上实现流级策略的可伸缩性问题上。智力优势：虽然sdx具有巨大的潜力，但它们也表现出相当大的挑战：sdx提供了执行（某些类型）策略的机制，但它们不定义策略。定义政策所需的框架是一个开放的研究领域。政策通常来源于提供者之间或提供者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）需要在提供者和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，使用链路带宽、处理周期和存储的权利），并且sdx为提供商代表其客户向其他提供商推销其（传输）服务提供了一种方式。目前的SDX设计没有考虑这些经济关系，因此忽略了互联网操作的一个关键方面。该项目包括旨在设计软件定义的互联网交换点控制器的基础研究，这些交换点可以被编程为实现端到端（即域间）路由策略，这些策略与网络实体之间的明确经济关系相关联。更广泛的影响：本研究的结果有可能对域间路由（互联网中网络提供商之间经济互动的核心）的实施和使用方式产生变革性影响，并在网络中提供新颖的服务。这项工作的跨学科性质——跨越工程学和经济学的界限——在开发技术上合理且可以在实践中采用的解决方案方面提出了特殊的挑战。这项工作包括教育部分。我们的工作成果将以开源工具集和出版物的形式传播。