Tese de Doutorado 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 Serviço

Data: 16/09/2019
Horário: 14h
Local: Sala 215 (videoconferência) no prédio 43412 do Instituto de Informática da UFRGS.

Banca Examinadora:
– Prof. Dr. Alberto Dainotti (CAIDA/UCSD – por videoconferência)
– Prof. Dr. Italo Fernando Scotá Cunha (UFMG – por videoconferência)
– Prof. Dr. Weverton Luis da Costa Cordeiro (UFRGS)

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

Abstract: Traffic delivery is a fundamental aspect of the Internet today as most of the traffic relates to applications such as streaming and gaming, which have strict service requirements. As a consequence, in recent years, peering infrastructures such as Internet eXchange Points and colocation facilities have emerged as crucial elements of the Internet topology. Today, these facilities provide physical interconnection for hundreds to thousands of Autonomous Systems, creating rich connectivity environments. Despite the potential benefits, any pair of Autonomous Systems needs first to agree on exchanging traffic. By interviewing and surveying more than 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, Autonomous Systems often prefer long-term contracts at the expense of a potential mismatch between actual delivery performance and current traffic dynamics. Autonomous Systems 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 peering infrastructures have a considerable unexplored potential to allow network operators to be more responsive to the Internet traffic dynamics and improve wide-area traffic delivery performance, since, in addition to the rich connectivity, their peering ports have substantial amounts of spare capacity during most time. To unleash this potential, we propose Dynam-IX, a Dynamic Interconnection eXchange. Dynam-IX allows network operators to build trust cooperatively and implement traffic engineering policies to exploit the plentiful interconnection opportunities at peering infrastructures quickly while preserving the privacy of peering policies. 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 Autonomous Systems. To evaluate our approach, we build a prototype and show that an AS can establish tens of agreements per minute with negligible storage and network overheads for Autonomous Systems and the peering infrastructure. We also show that Dynam-IX scales to the size of the largest peering infrastructures, demonstrating its practicality.

Keywords: Internet, Wide-area traffic delivery, Interconnection, Peering, Peering Infrastructures, Internet eXchange Point,  Colocation Facility.