IMR:MT: Internet Routing Experiments for the Cloud Era

Emerging applications will stress the Internet’s latency, reliability, throughput, and jitter more and more, from video conferencing, to AR/VR (augmented reality/virtual reality), to self-driving vehicles and traffic control, to remote health monitoring and health care. These applications are increasingly concentrated on a small number of large cloud and content providers. They deploy servers around the world to serve clients over short distances; and they peer directly with many edge networks to directly deliver services. Academic researchers lack realistic experimentation environments for this important setting. Existing testbeds lack the global footprint and rich interconnectivity of large modern providers, and they cannot support the low-latency and high-throughput traffic that emerging applications demand. This project will build a platform that enables researchers to conduct Internet routing experiments in an environment that is faithful to real-world cloud providers. To democratize research in this important setting, this project will build a new software router for existing PEERING testbed capable of supporting high performance; the routers will be deployed at 30 cloud sites across six continents, with nearly 10,000 BGP peers, dramatically expanding PEERING's footprint; and the project will build and make available tools for researchers to conduct experiments in this setting, controlling the routes and traffic exchanged between the cloud sites and the peers, and measuring and archiving the results.The primary impact of this project will be in democratizing access to research in the setting of a globally deployed, highly interconnected cloud network with granular control, one which is critical and central to today's Internet and hence society. By opening this research area to researchers without privileged access to hypergiants and cloud providers, the project will enable cutting-edge research that can shape the Internet and Internet applications of the future, benefiting society. The high-performance software router we build will also be useful in many other settings. The project will also develop class projects that involve real-world experiments in this setting, helping to train students in this critical area.The project will extend the PEERING testbed, and the extensions will be documented on the PEERING website: https://peering.ee.columbia.edu/This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.