Visible to the public Moving Bits with a Fleet of Shared Virtual Routers

TitleMoving Bits with a Fleet of Shared Virtual Routers
Publication TypeConference Paper
Year of Publication2018
AuthorsKathiravelu, P., Chiesa, M., Marcos, P., Canini, M., Veiga, L.
Conference Name2018 IFIP Networking Conference (IFIP Networking) and Workshops
Date PublishedMay 2018
PublisherIEEE
ISBN Number978-3-903176-08-9
KeywordsBandwidth, bandwidth costs, cloud computing, cloud providers, cloud-assisted networks, Collaboration, composability, computing resources, data transfer, data transfers, dedicated resources, Economics, flexible network service chains, Human Behavior, human factors, Internet, Internet core hubs, Internet ecosystem, Internet-scale Computing Security, Internet-scale interconnections, IP networks, IP transit prices, Metrics, networking community, offloading network functionality, on-demand instances, Policy Based Governance, price disparity, Pricing, pubcrawl, resilience, Resiliency, Scalability, shared virtual routers, telecommunication network routing, telecommunication network topology, third-party cloud spot instances, traffic demands, transit providers, unit pricing, virtual network provider, virtualisation
Abstract

The steady decline of IP transit prices in the past two decades has helped fuel the growth of traffic demands in the Internet ecosystem. Despite the declining unit pricing, bandwidth costs remain significant due to ever-increasing scale and reach of the Internet, combined with the price disparity between the Internet's core hubs versus remote regions. In the meantime, cloud providers have been auctioning underutilized computing resources in their marketplace as spot instances for a much lower price, compared to their on-demand instances. This state of affairs has led the networking community to devote extensive efforts to cloud-assisted networks - the idea of offloading network functionality to cloud platforms, ultimately leading to more flexible and highly composable network service chains.We initiate a critical discussion on the economic and technological aspects of leveraging cloud-assisted networks for Internet-scale interconnections and data transfers. Namely, we investigate the prospect of constructing a large-scale virtualized network provider that does not own any fixed or dedicated resources and runs atop several spot instances. We construct a cloud-assisted overlay as a virtual network provider, by leveraging third-party cloud spot instances. We identify three use case scenarios where such approach will not only be economically and technologically viable but also provide performance benefits compared to current commercial offerings of connectivity and transit providers.

URLhttps://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/8697019
DOI10.23919/IFIPNetworking.2018.8697019
Citation Keykathiravelu_moving_2018