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.

互联网路由——尤其是域间路由——存在一系列众所周知的问题，使得新型端到端服务和应用程序的创新变得困难。路由决策是由路由器根据用户及其应用程序几乎无法控制的策略在本地做出的，从而导致路由决策未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（服务级别协议 (SLA)）决定的，而这种关系变化非常缓慢。结果之一是，在当今的互联网上几乎不可能提供具有任何真正的质量可预测性的端到端服务，更不用说保证了。此外，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以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，以及各个利益相关者为其流量表达和实施路由策略的潜力，使得 SDN 对于域间路由也很有吸引力。与此同时，越来越多的提供商间连接正在互联网交换点 (IXP) 上实现。在此背景下，软件定义的互联网交换点 (SDX) 被提议作为多个提供商集体控制互联网交换点 (IXP) 路由决策的一种方式。大多数 SDX 研究重点关注与提供商指定的组合策略和可能冲突的策略相关的问题，或者与在具有大量流量的主要 IXP 上实施流级策略的可扩展性问题相关的问题。智力优点：虽然 SDX 具有巨大的潜力，但它们也呈现出相当大的挑战：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，使用链路带宽、处理周期和存储的权利），并且 SDX 为提供商提供了一种代表其向其他提供商推销其（传输）服务的方式他们的客户。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。该项目包括旨在设计软件定义的互联网交换点控制器的基础研究，这些控制器可以通过编程来实施与网络实体之间的显式经济关系相关的端到端（即域间）路由策略。更广泛的影响：这项研究的结果有可能对域间路由（互联网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，以提供新颖的服务。网络。这项工作的跨学科性质——跨越工程和经济学的界限——对开发技术上合理且可在实践中采用的解决方案提出了特殊的挑战。这项工作涉及教育部分。我们的工作成果将以开源工具集和出版物的形式传播。