SmartTunnel: Achieving Reliability in the Internet

Abstract— Reliability is critical to a variety of network applications. Unfortunately, due to lack of QoS support across ISP boundaries, it is difficult to achieve even two 9s (99%) reliability in today’s Internet. In this paper, we propose SmartTunnel, an end-to-end approach to achieving reliability. A SmartTunnel is a logical point-to-point tunnel between two end points that spans multiple physical network paths. It achieves reliability by strategically allocating traffic onto multiple paths and performing FEC coding. Such an end-to-end approach requires no explicit QoS support from intermediate ISPs, and is therefore easy to deploy in today’s Internet. To fully realize the potential of SmartTunnel, we analytically derive near-optimal traffic allocation schemes that minimize loss rates. We extensively evaluate our approach using trace-driven simulations, ns-2 simulations, and experiments on PlanetLab. Our results clearly demonstrate that SmartTunnel is effective in achieving...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2007
• Where: INFOCOM
• Authors: Yi Li, Yin Zhang, Lili Qiu, Simon S. Lam
• Keywords: Communications, End-to-end Approach, INFOCOM 2007, Logical Point-to-point Tunnel, Today’s Internet