Proposta de Tese de Pedro de Botelho Marcos

Aluno: Pedro de Botelho Marcos
Orientador: Prof. Dr. Antonio Marinho Pilla Barcellos

Título: Towards a dynamic Internet interconnection ecosystem for improved wide-area traffic delivery
Linha de Pesquisa: Arquiteturas, Protocolos e Gerência de Redes e Serviços

Data: 20/02/2019
Horário: 14h
Local: Prédio 43412 – AUD-1 do Instituto de Informática

Banca Examinadora:
Prof. Dr. Lisandro Zambenedetti Granville (UFRGS)
Prof. Dr. Alberto Dainotti (CAIDA/UCSD – por videoconferência)
Prof. Dr. Italo Fernando Scotá Cunha (UFMG – por videoconferência)

Presidente da Banca: Prof. Dr. Antonio Marinho Pilla Barcellos

Abstract: Autonomous Systems (ASes) can reach hundreds of networks via Internet eXchange Points (IXPs), allowing improvements in traffic delivery performance and competitiveness. Despite the potential benefits, any pair of ASes needs first to agree on exchanging traffic. By surveying 100+ network operators, we discovered that most interconnection agreements are established through ad-hoc and lengthy processes heavily influenced by personal relationships and brand image. As such, ASes often prefer long-term contracts at the expense of a potential mismatch between actual delivery performance and current traffic dynamics. A Ses may also miss interconnection opportunities because their operators do not have a personal relationship or do not have information to build their opinion about the other AS. We argue that a systematic approach would allow network operators to be more responsive to the Internet traffic dynamics and to utilize their interconnection ports at IXPs better. To improve wide-area traffic delivery performance, we propose DynamIX, a framework that allows operators to build trust cooperatively and implement traffic engineering policies to exploit the rich interconnection opportunities at IXPs quickly. Dynam-IX offers a protocol to automate the interconnection process, an intent abstraction to express interconnection policies, a legal framework to digitally handle contracts, and a distributed tamper-proof ledger to create trust among ASes. We build and preliminarily evaluate a Dynam-IX prototype and show that an AS can establish tens of agreements per minute with negligible overhead for ASes and IXPs. While our initial results indicate the feasibility of our approach, important aspects still need to be investigated. These include (i) a more in-depth analysis of the spare capacity at IXPs to understand the practicality of improving resource utilization; (ii) extending the interconnection intent abstraction to allow network operators to configure their peering policies and automatically establish interconnection agreements; and (iii) evaluating our prototype in different scenarios as our initial results consider only a stress experiment.

Keywords: Internet. Wide-area traffic delivery. Interconnection. Peering. Internet eXchange Point.