Evolving a Manageable Internet Tom Anderson University of

Evolving a Manageable Internet Tom Anderson University of Washington 1

Internet at an Impasse The Internet’s current evolutionary path will not address its fundamental challenges: – Security § Security costs of connecting to the Internet dwarf bandwidth costs; no end in sight to viruses, worms, Do. S, spam – Robustness § End to end reliability orders of magnitude lower than phone service – Manageability § State of the art: “tweak and pray” – Performance § End to end performance orders of magnitude slower than the raw hw – Evolvability § Qo. S, ad hoc networks, mobility, etc.

What is to be done? Do we know how to fix these problems? If we did know, could we implement the fix? Answer is no to both, for today’s Internet – Little to no conceptual understanding of how to address these issues – Little to no ability to implement changes to the Internet architecture, except via point solutions that often make matters worse in the long run Analogy with programming languages in 80’s/90’s – dominant standards in industry crowd out academic innovation; eventually more radical approaches succeed

Internet Myth: Thin Waist Simple, universal end to end packet delivery service, implemented by multiple, cooperating service providers IP

Internet Reality: Thick Waist Any architectural change requires global agreement – ISPs have little incentive or ability to evolve architecture – result: ossification with feature creep IP NAT, VPN, firewalls, IDS, …

RIP Thesis Services can only have two out of three among: multiprovider (e. g. , planetary scale) high level interface (e. g. , IP) evolvability Examples: IP, email, telephony, CDNs, multicast, …

A New Model for Planetary Services RIP: horizontal, planetary-scale service providers – At base, a virtual hardware abstraction (cycles and bit pipes to neighbors); layer planetary-scale services on top … IP as a service Routing Resource Management Information plane HWP HWP

Why now? Rate of increase in cycles/$ >> internet bw/$ Jim Gray (2003): Cost of sending TCP ack = 500 K instructions What about future? Moore’s Law vastly understates potential for CPU improvement: 60% squared (density) * 30% (cycle time) * 20% (volume) Raw optics improving at a similar rate => captive backbones Cumulative improvement in the engineering of distributed systems We understand how to engineer secure, reliable, efficient distributed systems, if we aren't constrained by legacy systems

Overlays as a Disruptive Technology • Add a new layer to the network architecture – overlay networks overlay § purpose-built virtual networks that use the existing Internet for transmission § the Internet was once deployed as an overlay on top of the telephony network Internet • Challenges – isolate services from each other and the Internet – exploit planetary-scale cooperation/vantage points – become the intermediary for WAN packets

Evolution Requirements Any new architecture needs to be: Incentive compatible for end users Opt-in at a fine-grain (hijack packets via name xlation) Overlay routing for reliability, bandwidth, latency PCP to manage legacy Internet paths Incentive compatible for hardware providers Avoid 95% charging intervals Win-win bilateral barter Self-managing, secure, evolvable as an engineered solution

cumulative % of flows Example: Multiple ISP Negotiation anarchy barter path length inflation relative to socially optimal % distance inflation anarchy barter 50 1. 0 10 1. 4 1. 1 5 2. 0 1. 2 1 5. 9 1. 5 • Bilateral barter closely approximates socially optimal – Reduces need for manual route tweaks

Summary Make security, manageability, efficiency, etc. engineering problems, not political ones