Title
Towards a Speed of Light Internet
Abstract
In principle, a network can transfer data at nearly the speed of light. Today's Internet, however, is much slower: our measurements show that latencies are typically more than one, and often more than two orders of magnitude larger than the lower bound implied by the speed of light. Closing this gap would not only add value to today's Internet applications, but might also open the door to exciting new applications. Thus, we propose a grand challenge for the networking research community: building a speed-of-light Internet. Towards addressing this goal, we begin by investigating the causes of latency inflation in the Internet across the network stack. Our analysis reveals that while protocol overheads, which have dominated the community's attention, are indeed important, infrastructural inefficiencies are a significant and under-explored problem. Thus, we propose a radical, yet surprisingly low-cost approach to mitigating latency inflation at the lowest layers and building a nearly speed-of-light Internet infrastructure.
Year
Venue
Field
2015
CoRR
Telecommunications,Computer security,Latency (engineering),Computer science,Upper and lower bounds,Computer network,Protocol stack,Inflation,The Internet,Overhead (business)
DocType
Volume
Citations 
Journal
abs/1505.03449
0
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.34
6
4
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Ankit Singla144329.69
Balakrishnan Chandrasekaran28410.39
P. Brighten Godfrey32519145.37
Bruce M. Maggs43592368.31