The Effect of Network and Infrastructural Variables on SPDY's Performance

HTTP is a successful Internet technology on top of which a lot of the web resides. However, limitations with its current specification, i.e. HTTP/1.1, have encouraged some to look for the next generation of HTTP. In SPDY, Google has come up with such a proposal that has growing community acceptance, especially after being adopted by the IETF HTTPbis-WG as the basis for HTTP/2.0. SPDY has the potential to greatly improve web experience with little deployment overhead. However, we still lack an understanding of its true potential in different environments. This paper seeks to resolve these issues, offering a comprehensive evaluation of SPDY's performance using extensive experiments. We identify the impact of network characteristics and website infrastructure on SPDY's potential page loading benefits, finding that these factors are decisive for SPDY and its optimal deployment strategy. Through this, we feed into the wider debate regarding HTTP/2.0, exploring the key aspects that impact the performance of this future protocol

Service-centric networking for distributed heterogeneous clouds

Optimal placement and selection of service instances in a distributed heterogeneous cloud is a complex trade-off between application requirements and resource capabilities that requires detailed information on the service, infrastructure constraints, and the underlying IP network. In this article we first posit that from an analysis of a snapshot of today's centralized and regional data center infrastructure, there is a sufficient number of candidate sites for deploying many services while meeting latency and bandwidth constraints. We then provide quantitative arguments why both network and hardware performance needs to be taken into account when selecting candidate sites to deploy a given service. Finally, we propose a novel architectural solution for service-centric networking. The resulting system exploits the availability of fine-grained execution nodes across the Internet and uses knowledge of available computational and network resources for deploying, replicating and selecting instances to optimize quality of experience for a wide range of services

The Internet Ecosystem: The Potential for Discrimination

Symposium: Rough Consensus and Running Code: Integrating Engineering Principles into Internet Policy Debates, held at the University of Pennsylvania\u27s Center for Technology Innovation and Competition on May 6-7, 2010. This Article explores how the emerging Internet architecture of cloud computing, content distribution networks, private peering and data-center services can simultaneously foster a perception of unfair network access while at the same time enabling significant competition for services, content, and innovation. A key enabler of these changes is the emergence of technologies that lower the barrier for entry in developing and deploying new services. Another is the design of successful Internet applications, which already accommodate the variation in service afforded by the current Internet. Regulators should be aware of the potential for anti-competitive practices in this broader Internet Ecosystem, but should carefully consider the effects of regulation on that ecosystem