CNS Core: Medium: Slack-Aware Networking

Tufts University, Medford MA

Investigators

Abstract

Today's Internet is increasingly moving towards communication where data may not be needed immediately: set-top-boxes or smart-phone applications pre-fetching content, Internet of Things (IoT) devices uploading their data to the cloud, or data centers doing geo-distributed replication. This research posits that such communication may afford to have ``slack'' built into it, i.e., packets may not be immediately required by the other endpoint and can tolerate additional delay of few seconds to even minutes and hours. Slack allows the network to do ``slack-aware networking” -- the network can leverage slack information to reduce the cost and energy requirements of the network, and to improve performance, availability and cost for end-users. This project will investigate the challenges and opportunities present in making slack a first class concept of the future Internet. It will explore the design of SAIN, a slack-aware Internet with explicit support for slack at the application level as well as inside the network. SAIN will allow applications to express their slack requirements to the network while the network will use slack-aware optimizations at various levels of the system (transport, routing, forwarding), providing benefits to the network and service providers, as well as end-users. The potential benefits of SAIN will be evaluated on a wide range of applications, including Video-on-Demand, IoT, and Geo-Distributed Replication. Overall, this research will make key contributions in networking and systems research as well as at the intersection of networking and human-computer-interaction (HCI). Specifically, through user studies and application analysis, the proposed research will provide insights about usage of popular applications and the amount of slack they can tolerate. It will also introduce new functionality at multiple layers of the network stack, including storage abstractions to decouple the sender and receiver, slack-aware routing and forwarding mechanisms, slack-aware end-to-end data services, and a new slack-aware interface between the application and the network. The proposed research will be tightly integrated with the courses offered by the PI at Tufts University, and will engage undergraduate, women and URM students in integrative research and education. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.