Minimal deployable endpoint-driven network forwarding: principle, designs and applications
Zhuotao Liu · Illinois Digital Environment for Access to Learning and Scholarship (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign) · 2017
Networked systems now have significant impact on human lives: the Internet, connecting the world globally, is the foundation of our information age, the data centers, running hundreds of thousands of servers, drive the era of cloud computing, and even the Tor project, a networked system providing online anonymity, now serves millions of daily users. Guided by the end-to-end principle, many computer networks have been designed with a simple and flexible core offering general data transfer service, whereas the bulk of the application-level functionalities have been implemented on endpoints that are attached to the edge of the network. Although the end-to-end design principle gives these networked systems tremendous success, a number of new requirements have emerged for computer networks and their running applications, including untrustworthy of endpoints, privacy requirement of endpoints, more demanding applications, the rise of third-party Intermediaries and the asymmetric capability of endpoints and so on. These emerging requirements have created various challenges in different networked systems. To address these challenges, there are no obvious solutions without adding in-network functions to the network core. However, no design principle has ever been proposed for guiding the implementation of in-network functions. In this thesis, We propose the first such principle and apply this principle to propose four designs in three different networked systems to address four separate challenges. We demonstrate through detailed implementation and extensive evaluations that the proposed principle can live in harmony with the end-to-end principle, and a combination of the two principle offers more complete, effective and accurate guides for innovating the modern computer networks and their applications.