The current Internet lacks a bandwidth-reservation infrastructure that
enables fine-grained inter-domain reservations for end hosts. This is hindering
the provisioning of quality-of-service guarantees for real-time applications
like video calls and gaming, cloud-based systems, financial transactions,
telesurgery, and other remote applications that benefit from reliable
communication. This paper introduces Hummingbird, a novel lightweight
inter-domain bandwidth-reservation system that addresses several shortcomings
of previous designs.
Hummingbird supports flexible and composable reservations and enables
end-to-end guarantees without requiring autonomous systems to manage
reservations for their endhosts. Previous systems tied reservations to
autonomous-system numbers or network addresses, which limits the flexibility of
reservations. In contrast, our system decouples reservations from network
identities and, as a result, the control plane from the data plane. This design
choice facilitates multiple co-existing control-plane mechanisms and enables
innovative approaches, such as a control plane based on blockchain smart
contracts that offers tradeable bandwidth-reservation assets and end-to-end
guarantees. The data-plane design ensures simplicity for efficient processing
on border routers, which streamlines implementation, deployment, and traffic
policing while maintaining robust security properties.Comment: 14 pages, 7 figure