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Title
Detour: A Case for A Virtual Internet
Authors
Thomas Anderson, Amit Aggarwal, David Becker, Neal Cardwell, Andrew Collins,
Eric Hoffman, Stefan Savage, John Snell, Amin Vahdat, Geoff Voelker,
and John Zahorjan
Department of Computer Science and Engineering
University of Washington
Abstract
Despite its obvious success, robustness, and scalability, the
Internet suffers from a number of end-to-end performance and
availability problems, including long and unpredictable latencies
for short connections, high drop rates, low throughput for long transfers
even when there is ample link bandwidth, poor route selection, and periods of
unavailability despite the existence of redundant paths. These problems
are not easy to fix in the current Internet; for example, total throughput
can get significantly worse as we increase buffering, increase link
bandwidth, add links, or add load. The need to provide backward
compatibility makes it nearly impossible to directly address
these issues by modifying the Internet protocols.
Our approach is to exploit the inefficiencies of the Internet
by deploying a "virtual Internet" of intelligent routers
spread at key access and interchange points around the network.
Routers in the virtual Internet tunnel across the physical Internet
to communicate with one another, enabling the incremental deployment
of new routing, congestion control, buffer management, link
scheduling, and transport protocols. To explore these ideas,
we are building a prototype virtual Internet, called Detour;
we demonstrate that this approach offers the potential for an order
of magnitude improvement in latency, bandwidth, packet loss rates,
and availability relative to today's physical Internet.