Towards a Speed of Light Internet

TL;DR

This paper advocates for achieving Internet data transfer speeds close to the speed of light by identifying and addressing infrastructural inefficiencies that cause latency beyond the theoretical minimum.

Contribution

It introduces the concept of a speed-of-light Internet and proposes a low-cost approach to reduce latency by tackling infrastructural inefficiencies at the network's lowest layers.

Findings

Latency is often 10-100 times higher than the speed-of-light lower bound.

Infrastructural inefficiencies significantly contribute to latency inflation.

Protocol overheads are important but not the sole cause of latency.

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.